Today we are announcing an experimental pilot of third-party ads on Quora. At this stage we'll only be showing ads from a handful of advertisers, and our main aim is to learn what kind of advertising works best for readers, writers, and advertisers.

We know that, when done carelessly, ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likes banner ads, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needs. However, we are optimistic that we will be able to introduce ads on Quora in a way that will fit in well and ideally make the product better.

Our initial ads will show on only a very small number of question pages, and only in cases where we believe that the fact that someone is reading this particular question page means that they are likely to be interested in what the advertiser is offering. Similarly, we plan to maintain a high bar for advertisers, so that the content of our ads is comparable to the quality of the content they appear alongside.

Any sponsor-influenced content will be clearly labeled (currently with “promoted by”) to distinguish it from other Quora content.

Our first advertisers will include Lever, Uber, Wealthfront and Sunrun. If you are interested in advertising on Quora you can now visit quora.com/business to create an ad account. If you have feedback about ads in Quora, then we would welcome your feedback in the comments below.

Quora's mission is to share and grow the world's knowledge. To fully achieve that we need to make sure that the knowledge on Quora will improve and last forever. We hope that revenue from ads will play a part in empowering us to do that.