India looks to have passed the US to become Quora’s top source of traffic

Question-and-answer site Quora is doing well in India after reportedly passing the US as its top source of traffic, as noticed by Next Big What.

According to Alexa, India represents 30.8% of traffic, compared to 21.8% from the US. The UK, Canada and China round out the top five.

I searched on Quora for a question on why the site is so popular in India, but I couldn’t find one. That’s disappointing, and hardly fitting with this bit of news. I did, however, find this:

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Why are there so many IITians (Indian Institutes of Technology students) on Quora?

To which Nishit Jain responded:

Quora started off primarily as a source of information (and valuable information at that) in the technological and start-up domain i.e. the ‘Silicon Valley’ domain. It has only recently become a diverse source with a focus on content production in other fields as well.

A lot of IITians are heavily tuned in to the workings of Silicon Valley and the ‘geeks’ here are on par with the geeks in MIT or Stanford when it comes to new websites like this. A lot of the initial users were on Quora for an exchange of information on solely technical (and engineering based) topics like ICPC, IMO and general start-up experience. Most innovations follow an S-curve and these guys were the early adopters. Most of them are very highly respected in their fields of choice and thus, it was only natural for the ‘masses of IIT’ to follow their lead and join Quora as well.

Next Big What speculates that the Indian population’s interest in Quora comes from two segments: entrepreneurs and college students. Integration with Facebook is also believed to have spurred adoption in the country. At the end of 2012, there were 71 million Facebook users in India.

Of course, India’s population of 1.2 billion is a strong reason for the high traffic, but China, which has an even larger population, contributes less than 1/10th the traffic that India does, according to Alexa.

Update: Here are a couple Quora threads discussing the site’s popularity in India: How did Quora become so popular among Indians? and Why are there so many Indians on Quora? (h/t @caligarn)

See also: Re-living 2012 through the most interesting questions asked on Quora

Image credit: Brand X Pictures