With a new country manager, Quora has big plans for India

BENGALURU: Quora has appointed Gautam Shewakramani as its country manager for India, which the US-based question-and-answer site views as an increasingly important market.

The company wants to focus on making the platform more easily accessible to Indians and explore the potential to introduce content in regional languages, Shewakramani said.

"It's important for us to continue to expand to more languages around the world ... At this time we haven't made any decisions about expanding into Indian regional languages, but it's something that we are exploring and will consider," he told ET.

Shewakramani joined Quora from AudioCompass, an audio tour app for travellers that he had founded. According to Quora, it has more than 200 million monthly unique visitors globally, including many from India. The company, though, declined to share country-specific numbers. It plans to organise meetups for users across the globe. In India, it has had over 30 user-led meet-ups in several cities, including Bhopal, Ranchi and Bhubaneswar.

"We are very conscious to ensure that it (the platform) is a place for knowledge on a wide variety of topics, and our traffic from India reflects that diversity. Popular topic areas in India include career advice, exam or test advice, and technology," Shewakramani said.

The company recently rolled out a video beta, where users can respond to questions by recording video answers through iOS and Android apps. Depending on the question, the answers could be a single video, multiple videos or a combination of videos and text.

It is also introducing a video feed, a new tab to discover and record videos.

Quora's primary monetisation focus is advertising. The company launched an ad platform during mid-May 2017 and has Indian advertisers running ads on it.

However, Quora will not be opening any office in India for now. At present, it is also not looking at hiring or selling advertisement space and getting involved in user operations, though these are options that it could consider in the future, Shewakramani said.