Google seems to consistently steal the spotlight from competitor Yahoo! these days. At least Yahoo! has a comeuppance every once in a while. Yahoo! Answers appears to be one of the few shining lights these days, as it is the second most popular Internet Q&A site behind Wikipedia.

This is no small matter, as Yahoo! Answers handles 12.3 million monthly visitors -- customers looking for research and answers on probably every imaginable topic. Too bad Yahoo!'s next-generation "Panama" advertising platform is not sitting alongside the Yahoo! Answers website these days -- but it will be shortly.

For perspective, try this on for size: Media sensation YouTube had 13.4 million visitors in June, and during the same period, 947,000 people clicked on Google Answers, down 4 percent from May. Yahoo! Answers, when stacked against these numbers, starts to look pretty impressive from a monthly visitor standpoint, yes?

"Yahoo has been rapidly losing market share in search to Google," says Jim Friedland, senior Internet analyst with Cowen & Co., "so this is a clever way to get people to interact with the site." I agree with this statement -- if you can't beat Google at search, there are other ways to get eyeballs on your web property -- and make money from the interaction. Yahoo! just needs to find more of them.

Not too long I posted a story about how Yahoo! Answers was becoming a dominant part of Yahoo!'s traffic, and one of the most visited information and reference type sites online. Techcrunch notes that Yahoo! Answers is launching something called an 'Ask the Planet' campaign. The idea is that celebrities, notables, and other high-profile type people (like Arianna Huffington, Suze Orman, Stephen Hawking, Bono, etc) will provide the answers in order to win prizes.

The prizes are pretty nifty, like free gas for a year for answering correctly to a question posed by the Click and Clack brothers from NPR. Yahoo! is clearly trying to drive the visibility of an already popular service even higher by using celebrity mojo. The question is, how and when will Yahoo! choose to slip in advertising or seek to monetize this interesting resource, and what effect will that have on their traffic and bottom line?

Yahoo! Answers is a very cool service and very popular. It showcases how Yahoo! can provide the technology to connect consumers and producers -- in this case, the producers of answers. 

I didn't realize just how popular Yahoo! Answers was until I spotted this blog post by Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion that passed on info from SEO Watch. Apparently, Yahoo! Answers is really exploding into something big online right now. Yahoo! Answers has had some 10 million answers posted, some 4% of the entire US that is online has visited it, and it is now the third largest reference site.

That's just amazing if you think about it. Steve posts some Technorati and Google trend charts that show Yahoo! Answers is on a growth curve. As Yahoo! turns to figuring out how to monetize and utilize this traffic, Yahoo! Answers could have a big impact on Yahoo!'s bottom line.

[picture credit: ppdigital]