no.stupid.answers

Some excellent news came out of Answers Corporation today:

Answers Corporation Reports Q4 and Full Year 2008 Financial Results
Q4 Record Revenue of $4.63 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $1.95 million

Answers Corporation… today reported unaudited results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2008.

“Answers is very pleased to report a milestone quarter and fiscal year,” stated Robert Rosenschein, Chairman and CEO. “Quarterly revenues rose 30% sequentially to $4.63 million, with Adjusted EBITDA reaching $1.95 million, and our cash balance increasing $2 million to $11.74 million.

WikiAnswers continues to be an amazing property. comScore ranked it the fastest growing domain for all of 2008, as measured by percent change in unique monthly visitors for the top 200 US Web domains. Answers’ financial progress is a testament to our focus on the product without losing control of expenses. We look forward to continued growth in 2009 - and to building our value proposition of providing our users useful, relevant, quick answers.”

For more, check out the full report or listen to the conference call.

Well, this sure is a ‘WikiAnswers Wednesday’ because there is some pretty cool news to come out of Answers Corp today: WikiAnswers has been declared the fastest-growing domain in 2008 out of the top 200 U.S. domains. That means WikiAnswers has managed to rake in some impressive stats two years in a row!

Here’s the lowdown from the Answers Corp press release:

“…according to analysis using comScore data (comScore, US Top 200 Web Domains Report, December 2007 vs. December 2008, ranked by % change), WikiAnswers’ unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. grew 154%, to nearly 16.5 million. This ranks WikiAnswers as the fastest growing domain in 2008, of the top 200 in the U.S. as measured by unique monthly visitors.”

Go ahead and check out a list of the top 20.

And what would a happy occasion be without a word from Bob Rosenschein, Answers Chairman and CEO?

“We continue to be excited by the rate at which the community contributes content to our unique wiki-Q&A platform… Our goal is to build the world’s largest and most useful Q&A database. We aim to cultivate a vibrant community and invest in the quality of answers generated by its members.”

Congrats to all the dedicated contributors and back-end team members who make the WikiAnswers world go ’round! You’ve done it again.

Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch picked up on the 2008 Year in Review today and wrote it up here. In an online world where others - like Google and Yahoo - are focusing on the year’s searches, Answers.com and WikiAnswers chose to focus on the year’s questions.

And it’s nice to see he liked this year’s collage, too…

Celebrity babies, a snowy Baghdad, Sarah Palin, Sex and the City: it’s been a weird, wonderful and at times, worrying, year. But as it comes to an end we can sit back and review what happened throughout 2008.

With the combined efforts of Answers.com and WikiAnswers content, the 2008 Year in Review has been officially released. If you remember last year’s edition, it covered the questions asked and answered throughout 2007.

This year, there’s a nice new twist: the 2008 Year in Review includes related reference topics and featured spotlights from each month, along with the list of Q&A.

So go on and check it out! Before you know it, 2009 will be showing up and bringing us a whole new host of questions and answers.

You turn on the news, and you just can’t stop hearing all those names: Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden… They are everywhere, and the rumors are flying.

It could only mean one thing: It’s time to brush up on your presidential election knowledge before November rolls around.

Which is why WikiAnswers has a bunch of new categories that will serve as your official place to ask and answer questions concerning the U.S. presidential election in November: the candidates, the issues and more.

Here’s a quick ’site map’ of all the elections and current issues categories available:

• 2008 Presidential Campaign
• Joe Biden
• John McCain
• Barack Obama
• Sarah Palin
• 2008 Democratic National Convention
• 2008 Republican National Convention
• Global Warming
• Iraq war
• Veterans’ Affairs & Issues
• Abortion & Teen pregnancy
• Economics
• International Relations

I’ve been noticing in the last week that WikiAnswers is being consulted a lot for questions about Republican presidential front runner Senator John McCain.

Not to get into politics, but I can see why: He’s such a cutie. Don’t you want to just hug him and ask him to tell you a story?

Ok, maybe that’s not why. Maybe it’s because there are loads of questions about him in WikiAnswers.

Lately, I’ve come across quite a few John McCain-WikiAnswers mentions, including this blog post from The Washington Post, which researches the heights of the Republican candidates. WikiAnswers was asked How tall is John McCain? Interesting that WikiAnswers, along with many other reputable sites, lists him as 5′7” while his campaign folks are saying he is 5′9”. Maybe he’s just standing tall - super extra tall - for change.

Then there is Buzzflash.com, which wonders how far we should go into knowing about presidential candidates’ families (and finds out a bit about McCain’s on Answers.com).

Well, it’s important to educate ourselves before we vote… Here are a couple of John McCain appetizers:

• How long was John McCain a POW?
• Is John McCain going to die in office?
• Does John McCain have a tumor in his left cheek?

With all this talk of U.S. primary elections, Democrats, Republicans and the state of California, I thought it might be appropriate to discuss the important issues that Americans should be taking into consideration when deciding the new president in 2008.

The fact is, none of it really matters since we have WikiAnswers anyway. At least, that is according to the question I put forth this WikiAnswers Wednesday:

Could WikiAnswers develop an Artificial Intelligence and take over the planet like on Terminator?

The answer to this query comes from Zanbabe, a WikiAnswers Supervisor and top contributor (so you know she’s good):

Yes, of course. But we choose not to. We like to leave only footprints in the sands of time, and avoid all of that messy taking-over-the world-by-force stuff.

The actual plan (shhh, don’t tell anyone) is to take over the world through answering everyone’s questions. Eventually, the entire world will be so dependent on us that they will do anything we say… because they love us and depend on us, rather than fear us.

So, yeah. We could… but we have higher standards than that.

Note the smiley face at the end - you know she means business. I wouldn’t argue with a WikiAnswers Supervisor. Especially when she believes the site is more powerful than the Terminator. Hasta la vista, Zanbabe.