Quora To Set Up First Office In India; Adds Gujarati, Telugu Support

Calling India its fastest-growing market, Quora is looking to expand its user base in the country with support for more regional languages natively, as well as establishing its first India office.

The US-based Q&A social networking platform has also appointed former Yahoo India vice president Gurmit Singh as the new general manager for India.

Talking about the platform’s success in the country, Quora added that India is the fastest growing market for the company as it gets over 70Mn monthly unique actives (in English) from India. The company also added that since the launch of Quora Ads in 2017, the company has helped various Indian brands reach customers in niche segments thanks to the unique proposition of Quora.

One of the reasons for Quora’s growth has been its native support for Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Marathi. Now it’s also adding Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu to the mix, covering a whole lot of Indian regional language users.

Founded in 2009 by former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, Quora has earned a reputation for being a social network that focusses on quality discussions and conversations, though in recent times it’s earned notoriety as a platform for know-it-alls.

As per a 2018 report, almost 20.7% of Quora visitors are from India. Keeping this in mind, the platform launched a Hindi interface in June 2018 to strengthen its position in India. Of course, as the internet user base has expanded social networks have had to adapt to new users and their native tongues. In the Indian context, the biggest trend in the past two years has been localisation.

Earlier this month, Google News announced that it is adding native support for more Indian languages, while Twitter also customised its UI to support Indian regional languages this year.

A KPMG and Google India study pointed out that the regional language internet users have surpassed the english internet users. As of 2016, India had 234 Mn regional language internet users, compared to 175 Mn English internet users, the report added.

The 2011 census is also a great source to understand the penetration of the local languages. The census highlights that Hindi is one of the most common languages in India with over 57.09% share, whereas English has 10.67% share. The two languages are followed by Bengali (8.85%), Marathi (8.18%), Telugu (7.77%), Tamil (6.36%), Gujarati (4.99%), Urdu (5.18%), Kannada (4.84%) and many more.