What is a business, revenue, and advertising model?

Why should Quora eventually follow an advertising-based revenue model rather than a subscription fee model?

• I enjoy using Quora. It's a far cry from the "I'm now walking the dog and feeling blue" status updates I get on Facebook and "ur on 49" tweet hieroglyphics. I would be happy to pay say an annual subscription fee (within reasonable limits). Quora has close to a million active users and will probably grow in the coming couple of years to 20-30 million users (my own predictions). Even at small annual fee, say 20-30 dollars per year, that would rake in real money. So why should Quora follow a Facebook-like revenue model based on advertising? After all Facebook brought home a 4.27 billion $ of revenue in 2011 and needed basically 1 billion users to do that. That 4 dollars and 27 cents a head! That's meagre. The advertising revenue model for social media may not be the golden goose Silicon Valley VCs believe it is...

• Answer:

  I think Facebook has to remain free as it's more useful if it can get almost everyone on it's network. Let's face it if almost everyone in my personal network isn't there, I wouldn't care for Facebook. But the power of Quora is the quality of it's members not the quantity. In fact if I get answers from random people that are throwing their opinion to kill time, and offer nothing that I can learn from, Quora could loose it's power. So I think it needs to find a way to monetize on the content rather than on the users. That means they shouldn't have to advertise or push for more users, but develop values for people to participate on the stuff they know best. I believe making money from users, whether registration fees or advertisement would hurt Quora. If I was the decision maker on this, my factors for monetizing Quora would be: Quora should be able to make more money if the useful content grow in quality and quantity To grow earnings Quora should not need to advertise to everyone to become a member, but maybe it makes effort to bring in more knowledgeable people on topics that is lacking knowledgeable members It should not demotivate members who are contributing to the site Some ways to explore for monetizing the platform could be: Making top level information gathering system for news agencies that get informed on some trending topics and charge them for it Develop features such as Facebook Page except not to advertise, but as question and answer page. They can charge the companies for those pages. It would be a cheap platform for companies to provide a solution for their customers to help each other and gather a nice and live Q&A for their products. Additionally through these pages companies can tap into a society that already are accustomed to help each other. Please note I'm not a professional in this area, and I'm only responding as a Quora lover and user. Hope more knowledgeable people like would response to this question.