A source who knows a thing or two about Yahoo!, and I, were talking about possible strategies to monetize Yahoo! Answers. The source mentioned that Yahoo! was looking at Adsense-like sponsored links to make money. At that point, I realized something interesting:

Both Y! and Google and any other search service that makes money out of sponsored results rely in part on the user perception that sponsored links are more likely to give you the answer you want than organic results . But with a service such as Answers, that isn’t true any longer, and therefore sponsored links are unlikely to have a clickthrough rate high enough for Answers to break even.

For instance, say you’re searching for a good bar on MG Road in Bangalore. On search.yahoo.com, a sponsored link would likely be much better than an organic result in suggesting such a bar. But on Yahoo! Answers, an answer to such a query would likely be the best answer , much better than a sponsored link (a member of a community – in this case the Answers community – would probably trust a fellow member’s opinion more than he/she would an ad). Which is why a service like Answers defeats the very purpose of sponsored links!

On another plane, Y! Answers doesn’t have to make money on its own, provided the company can devise a smart enough strategy to drive traffic from Y! Answers to other Y! Service that do make money. Scoble talks about Google and YouTube in this context:

By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft…anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos. I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.