Quora Merged Questions – How They Work

In this new article, we are digging a bit deeper into my favourite site Quora and talking Quora Merged Questions and what it all means for the questions that you ask.

Let’s get started!

There is something that is troubling me over on Quora but before I get into that, I want to point out despite what you’re going to read in this article I still consider Quora to be phenomenal at what it does and what it offers.

Everything written is purely my feedback

So let’s dig into the Quora Partner Program

The Quora Partner Program is a great way for members to write questions and be compensated for the views those questions receive.

You write great questions that are engaging and you share the advertising revenue.

Top Partner Program members are making thousands a month and I myself have had a month where I took £1200 and that is around $1500 at today’s exchange rate.

And this is where the problems really start to manifest because since that payment the earnings and considerably dropped.

But why has this happened?

Well, my opinion is that there are just too many partners posting too many questions and too few quality answers being written.

There are only so many quality answers you can write in a day and you really have to pick and choose who you answer.

There is also now an increase of much shorter, poor answers and regular instances of the member answering just adding something like “why don’t you just Google this?”

Well, there is a long answer to this but so as not to get sidetracked the answer is because Quora wants to be the hub where everyone comes to get their answers and for that to happen the questions have to be asked and they have to be asked on Quora to be indexed.

If you want to challenge me on this notion then feel free to do so in the comments below.

Related Article  Tips for Quora Partners

Quora Merged Questions

This leads us on to merged questions on Quora

When a question is asked if it is too similar to a question that is already asked it is merged with the first question that was written.

Now I don’t have a problem with this as it is great for SEO and we don’t want masses of duplicate questions so question merging is good.

But here is where my major problem is with the system and how it works.

When you write a great question and it starts to earn money that’s great as it pays you for 12 months.

What is not so great is that if it merges with another Quora question then it no longer pays but what is even worse is that all earnings and that’s ALL earnings, past, present and future move over to the question it merges with.

You lose all the income from the question.

This Is a problem for me as I am not receiving merge notifications for old questions so I have no idea that merges are happening.

A day or so after a payment Quora does a financial question audit and when it sees merged questions it claws the money back and that is all good that’s the system that is how it works.

But the problem is how it is done.

After payment, you can find yourself owing Quora money.

You earn £20 and it is not credited, next day you earn £18 and it’s also not credited.

Your daily earnings don’t credit until you pay back what you owe from questions that have merged.

But how much do you need to pay back?

How do you know how much you have to pay back?

The answer to this question is you don’t.

My experience is that over the last couple of months I have not received any credited unpaid earnings for 3-4 days after payment and there is no way of checking which questions have merged or how much you need to pay back because in my experience I have not been notified of these question merges and I have no way of knowing how much thee questions have earned.

Let’s look at this another way

Let’s say you hit gold and you write a question and it pays you £300 over 3 or 4 months then suddenly for some reason it merges.

After the next payment, you need to pay back £300 before earnings start to credit again so you’re looking at 15-20 days depending on how much you earn a day where you are paying of your debt.

And you have no way of checking what has happened or why it has happened.

Sometimes another member can merge your question and if you do happen to get a notification great you can unmerge but if its an old question I have an idea that notifications stop and I say that because that is the case with my account.

Suddenly your question is stolen and your left paying back.

When Quora Merges Questions

If Quora merges a question then it is pretty much the same, no notifications on old questions and your left paying back your debt again.

When you post a question it is your responsibility to make sure that your question is as unique as possible and one way to do this is to search your question on Quora to see if it has already been asked.

But there is a problem here

I had a question merge the other day not a high earner but an earning question none the less.

I had done my checks and it was as unique as it could be.

The problem was the question had been asked but the original question was so badly written that it never showed in the search results.

Poor grammar, bad spellings, no answers. This question was poor.

It was asked anonymously so no one was making money from it and it was asked years ago so well over the 12 months paying period.

And I lost my question where I had worked hard to make it earn and curated it so the answers were good.

I had put the effort I and created a paying question and it merged into a dud that had been forgotten.

And that doesn’t seem right to me.

If a question is earning and it merges, why don’t partners keep the earnings up to the point where the merge occurs?

Why do they lose all earnings?

It seems especially unfair when your questions move to someone who is not in the Partner Program as the only one who then benefits is Quora.

And then when you can’t check analytics to see what has merged and when it merged and why and then you don’t know how much you are going to lose and how long it will take to payback it becomes very demoralising for Partners who work so hard.

It is not easy writing paying questions.

So What Needs To Happen?

Members should keep their earnings up to the point where the merge happens and then the having to payback at the start of a new month problem goes away.

We also need to be able to follow the money through merges and judge to see if the merges were valid or bad or worse still see if another member is stealing from you.

We should go one step further and just stop members from being able to merge.

Imagine if Quora accountants could not track money in and money out, they would go nuts.

Partners can check what comes into their account but they can’t follow the money back out and that needs to be addressed.

Members are sent a weekly earning report email.

This is the perfect opportunity to add questions merged data and the money in and out data.

Hopefully, this is something that will in the future be adopted.

Quora Merged Questions – Takeaways

Like I said at the start this article is just meant as feedback.

It is just my frustrations with what is otherwise a pretty spectacular site.

The merge bots do sometimes get things wrong and you can find yourself in a tug of war battle as you try to keep a valid question and I think Quora would agree with that but the problem is Partner Program members have problems tracking merges if notifications fail to arrive.

We can’t follow up and find out why we are not getting paid or for how long we won’t be paid and this is a problem.

We are left just having to trust everything is at it should be with our accounts?

But we know mistakes happen.

We know some members make bad merges thinking that they understand the intent of the question or worse they merge questions to steal them.

And they can be very costing and just demoralizing.

That’s all for now.

So do you use Quora?

Are you in the Partner Program?

What is your experience with questions merging?

Let me know in the comments section below.

Make sure that you subscribe so that you are notified when we reply.

And don’t forget to Follow Me On Quora.

regards Dexter

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Article Name

Quora Merged Questions - How they work and what they mean for you.

Description

In this new article, we are digging deeper into my favourite site Quora and talking Quora Merged Questions and what it means to the questions that you ask.

Author

Dexter Roona

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Infobunny

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