The bigger thing is not what fraction of Quora users use facebook logins, but how much of Quora's traffic is from search results by non-logged-in users (who may be new to the site).
I think Quora would be fine with 20-30k active users with accounts, creating questions/answers/comments. They've rolled out features (Credits, and requiring Credits to promote questions) which imply having a large number of people asking poor questions and giving poor answers is something they're actively trying to avoid.
Yet, if someone like Keith Rabois or Harj Taggar answers something within his field of expertise on Quora, it gets great search placement, AND often ends up syndicated to Forbes, etc.
"Quora as a replacement for blogging, by high value individuals" is the thing to look out for, not huge daily active user counts. With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize.
Not every social network has to be peer to peer. If I got to watch a community of great physics experts (Quora actually has some very strong engineering expertise in mech/nuclear, surprisingly) interact, and then pay to ask specific questions, I'd be quite happy. Either pay cash, or pay with answering IT, banking, war zone, etc. questions asked by those physics experts.
"With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize."
I went through the first dot.com bubble - and I heard a lot of sentences like that. Not saying that Quora isn't valuable, or that it isn't possible to monetize, but the whole build-traffic-and-we'll-figure-it-out-later gives me 'Nam flashbacks.
I used to do a lot at Quora - but the more I thought about it, the more I figured that not getting paid for giving up my knowledge was a bad idea. I find it most useful for discussions/information on start-ups.
All being said, they have a lot of talented people working there and a lot of great data - someone will buy them if they can't figure out how to make it work financially.
It's interesting that you mention traffic from search results. I do a lot of queries, on a lot of topics, some of which Quora could probably give me an answer to, and I have never, ever, seen a Quora question appear in Google's results. Until I checked, I actually thought Google didn't index them (it does, but I only see it when I put "Quora" in the query, which kind of defeats the purpose).
Could be due to a lot of things (location, Google bubbling me, etc) but frankly, if that's what they rely on, I feel they have a long way to go. They are very far behind Wikipedia or Stack Overflow, for that purpose (even if those aren't their most direct competitors).
I think Quora would be fine with 20-30k active users with accounts, creating questions/answers/comments. They've rolled out features (Credits, and requiring Credits to promote questions) which imply having a large number of people asking poor questions and giving poor answers is something they're actively trying to avoid.
Yet, if someone like Keith Rabois or Harj Taggar answers something within his field of expertise on Quora, it gets great search placement, AND often ends up syndicated to Forbes, etc.
"Quora as a replacement for blogging, by high value individuals" is the thing to look out for, not huge daily active user counts. With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize.
Not every social network has to be peer to peer. If I got to watch a community of great physics experts (Quora actually has some very strong engineering expertise in mech/nuclear, surprisingly) interact, and then pay to ask specific questions, I'd be quite happy. Either pay cash, or pay with answering IT, banking, war zone, etc. questions asked by those physics experts.