How will Yahoo make money from Answers?

They will charge a fee later just like Personals.

its a bread and circus component of their platform, their a big company so they can afford to do it and know what it does to its users(some of em)

This type of "peer" answer service might become viable, and people will pay for answers.

Yahoo has begun to get publicity from answers. At this point this is worth spending money on. As you can tell it is very popular and attracts people all the time. Yahoo has partnered with a number of companies and having something like this available to us makes Yahoo more attractive. No one can foresee the future. But the best way for Yahoo to kill this is to begin to charge for it. This I am sure has not been lost on them.

Good question. Sometimes companies just want to grow and venture into areas with marginal profitability. Maybe once it is known, they will add more advertising. Companies are interested in building market share and driving others out of the market. So if Yahoo has better capitalization, it could add a feature such as this which another service could not afford to add. Those companies could lose enough market share that they might become unprofitable and fold which would then reduce competition for Yahoo. I really don't know why Yahoo does this, but thank you Yahoo. It's fun!

thay make tons of money thru other services

It's all about the ads. I've been noticing them sneaking some in to different pages now too.

They are making a robot which will know all. This robot will be mass produced and take over the world. Oh My God!!!!!

They don't make money and I don't think they plan to. It's a free service, just something they offer to make Yahoo even more appealing as a brand name. The idea is that the Yahoo community has so much to offer, you'd never want to leave leave, etc. And frankly it works- I tend to spend most of my time at Yahoo branded pages when I'm just killing time.