After we made it possible to earn ad revenue from Questions (by moving them to one’s personal subdomain), there was some discussion in the Forums about which Questions are more likely to drive traffic and earn money for the Hubbers who asked them.
One of the best observations came from ngureco:
This is my observation, repeat, just my observation, which may be very wrong:
1.Questions with less than 5 answers had a tendency of not performing well.
2.Questions with at least 5 answers had a tendency of performing fairly well.
3.Questions that got more than 20 answers performed even better.
4.Questions with more than 20 answers had a very long column of answers for your readers to make use of ads on that page.
5.It would seem like its better to close your question once it gets past 20 answers. Sometimes you would get just one good hubber who would answer the question explicitly well with sufficient enough content that you would close it and sing, hallelujah. You certainly would vote up such an answer and go to his/her profile to learn more about such a person because it’s always a good thing to be associated with such a hubber.
6.It should be about time to make a hub of your own, if you can, on a question making at least 5 answers.
7.Pay special attention to the choice of your titles just as you would when you make hubs. And this seems to be the most difficult one since a long title that may attract more answers from your fellow hubbers is unlikely to attract good external traffic, and vice versa.
8.Generally, hubs had a higher tendency of performing far much better than questions.
As it happens, ngureco is pretty spot on with his estimations, even when it comes to numbers. From a report Ari Lamstein ran (which you can see below), it is quite clear that Questions with more Answers perform better and that Questions with more than 20 Answers do significantly better than those with fewer… so perhaps it woud be worth it to keep Questions open once they have more than 20 Answers, as tempting as it might be to simply highlight an excellent Hub Answer someone submitted.
Ngureco also makes an excellent point about carefully choosing succinct, polished titles for Questions and Hub Answers. As with all online titles, that which is polished, properly capitalized, clear, and coupled with words directly associated with its subject, is ideal. The more a Question or Hub’s title reflects words people would use when consulting search engines about the subject at hand, the better.
We also agree that Hubs are more likely to perform well and earn their authors money than Questions. Questions with a good list of Answers can make for great online resources, but nothing beats a well-formatted, well-written, media-rich Hub.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ngureco!
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