The business world has been turning to online revenues for quite a few years now and there appears to be a concerted understanding that online revenues can be generated in a handful of different ways. Online advertising has long been a large part of the online revenues generated by a wide variety of different companies as an awful lot of these companies have websites that are generated thanks to visitors going to the sites and clicking on various ads. Question and answer sites in particular, earn their money by having the answers to questions people are interested in. One site is trying to change that particular model by actually charging people for those answers, rather than charging the advertisers.

Pearl.com is looking to not only change the way online revenues are made, but also the way answer sites operate. One of the big differences between Pearl.com and the other question and answer sites like Mahalo (News - Alert) is that Pearl prides itself on having access to more than just the knowledge you can already find on the Internet. Pearl.com looks to offer professional advice from experts in their fields, rather than someone who is getting their info from Wikipedia. The company, formerly known as JustAnswers, is showing that there is a way to earn money doing this as they have already raked in more than $100 million in annual revenues.

Pearl.com founder Andy Kurtzig says that the company will continue to pursue this particular avenue despite the number of different free ask and answer sites that are operating for free to the users. While Pearl is seeing some real growth, the company is still trailing the king of these kinds of sites in Yahoo answers. That site is currently raking in about 53.6 million visitors per month. Pearl says it is currently getting about 7.4 million users per month, which is up from 4.7 million per month a year ago. 

Pearl is still growing, but it is making enough money that some doctors and lawyers on the site who serve as the professionals answering the questions (usually at around $30 a pop) can get as much as $40,000 a month. That kind of money will certainly make the site attractive to the experts, but whether or not it will remain attractive to those seeking questions has yet to be seen.

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