no.stupid.answers

If you’re going to be #2 - why not be #2 after… Facebook?

Answers.com’s WikiAnswers was rated the #2 fastest growing U.S. domain in 2009, right after Facebook. And, hey, that’s ok, since Answers.com recently implemented Facebook Connect as an option for signing in.

Here’s a little more from the official announcement:

“…according to comScore data… WikiAnswers’ unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. grew 74%^(*). This ranks WikiAnswers as the 2^nd fastest growing domain in 2009, second only to Facebook.com, of the top 50 U.S. domains in December 2008.”

Bob Rosenschein, Chairman and CEO of Answers.com, said this about the growth:

“The site’s unique self- reinforcing growth coupled with the efforts of the entire Answers.com team, have once again brought Answers.com to the culmination of a very successful year.”

So for the millions of Answers.com contributors out there - treat yourselves to some chocolate! Even the tiniest edits are building on the amazing, global, growing, collaborative Q&A project that is WikiAnswers.

Ready for a major announcement? Answers.com announced today a September comScore ranking of #13, up five positions from August. From today’s release:

…comScore data for September 2009. Answers.com’s combined U.S. unduplicated unique visitors reached 56.4 million in September, up 25% from 45.1 million in August. WikiAnswers had 46.3 million U.S. unique visitors and ReferenceAnswers had 21.4 million U.S. unique visitors in September.

According to comScore, Answers.com sites now have a higher audience than major brands such as CNN.com, craigslist and New York Times Digital.

In case you’d like a visual to take a mental picture:

Roi Carthy over at TechCrunch had this to say about the development:

What site has jumped five spots between August and September to become the 13th most visited site in the US, leapfrogging properties like New York Times and Viacom Digital?

Here are some hints: It’s listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?

The answer is— Answers.com.

Exemplifying that startups are long hauls, Answers.com, née GuruNet, has been plugging away since its founding in 1999. Ten years later, comScore’s September 2009 data places the reference and Q&A site as the 13th most popular site in the United States, pulling in 56.4M unique users. This is a whopping 25% increase on Answers.com’s August numbers.

Care for a fun fact? Based on unique visitors, WikiAnswers has crossed over and is the #1 community-driven Q&A site:

Congrats to the hard-working team behind Answers.com. Looking forward to more great news, products and site features!

Big news from Answers Corp today related to some new, spectacular numbers:

Answers Corporation Announces August comScore Rank of #18

Looks like Answers.com - including both its reference site and WikiAnswers - can boast some impressive U.S. unique visitor numbers for August, after participating in comScore’s new measurement system.

Answers Corporation… today reported comScore data for August 2009. This report reflects first-time measurement data following Answers’ implementation of comScore’s new measurement methodology, Media Metrix 360, also known as a “panel-centric hybrid” solution.

According to comScore, Answers’ U.S. unique visitors reached 45.1 million in August (rank #18). WikiAnswers had 36.2 million U.S. unique visitors and ReferenceAnswers had 16.5 million U.S. unique visitors in August.

More from Answers Corp explaining comScore’s new system:

Media Metrix 360
According to comScore, its new ‘hybrid’ measurement methodology is aimed at eliminating the long-standing confusion about the differences between internal client metrics and the publicly reported third-party audience estimates. comScore has developed a proprietary methodology to combine stand-alone panel and server-side metrics to calculate audience reach in a manner that is not effected by distortions such as cookie deletion, cookie rejection and non-user requested traffic. comScore clients can choose to implement hybrid measurement for their own sites by embedding beacon calls on user-requested content.

Disclaimer
It is important to note that certain comScore clients have moved to the Full Hybrid measurement methodology, while others have moved to “Partial Hybrid” status (as did Answers Corporation) or have yet to implement hybrid measurement. Consequently, direct comparison of a ranking post-Hybrid implementation vs. pre-Hybrid implementation may not reflect the actual change in the site’s ranking or audience size over time.

Here’s a comment from Answers Corp CEO Bob Rosenschein:

We are admirers of Jimmy Wales but must set the record straight about the recent statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”.

Wikia’s Answers category is indeed one of thousands of wikis on its site, right between Ansible and Anthony Trollope. It started in November 2004 and had almost no activity for the past four years. By August 2007, the site had a total of 17 answers. By their launch last week, there were about 1,000. The site remains very small, despite their seeding thousands of unanswered questions last week.

In June of 2004, an entrepreneur named Chris Whitten bought the domain www.wikianswers.com. He pointed it to his user-generated Q&A site, then known as FAQ Farm. A vibrant community of passionate contributors formed and did a fantastic job answering questions. By the time Chris sold FAQ Farm and  wikianswers.com to us in November 2006, the site already had 280,000 questions and 200,000 answers. Shortly thereafter, we re-named the product WikiAnswers.

True to Chris’ vision, our goal is to create the world’s greatest question and answer site. We are well on our way, and the numbers tell the story best: over 8,000,000 questions (35,000 new ones every day); over 3,000,000 answers (10,000 new every day); 16.5 million unique visitors in the US and 26.7 worldwide in December, according to comScore; over 2 million registered users; and over 500 volunteer supervisors.

We do agree with Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia Inc., that “there is room for many organizations to be successful in organizing human knowledge.” However, Wikia is creating market confusion by associating its Q&A category with our market-leading WikiAnswers domain and site.

I would like to thank WikiAnswers founder Chris Whitten and the community that he started for their wonderful efforts building WikiAnswers. We have much to be proud of. According to comScore, by percentage growth, WikiAnswers.com was the fastest growing top 200 US domain for all of 2008.

– Robert Rosenschein
CEO, Answers Corporation

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.

…but not those charts.

comScore just announced their October Top 50 Web properties. Answers.com sites are up from 45th in September to 34th in October, with about 25 million unique users in the US.

Check out comScore’s top-50 chart and notice that Answers.com properties are actually just thousands away from receiving the 33rd spot. We’ll have to wait and see what the November scores bring.

comScore released the top U.K. web rankings for September 2008 and let’s not pretend to be shocked when I report that Answers.com properties - that’s including WikiAnswers - came out #1. Answers.com came out first with a 32% increase in unique visitors for that month, in a list that includes  - well - a whole bunch of sites that are British in nature.

Here’s the chart for the full picture (and here’s the source):