FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces.

They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn’t very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions.

On the gaming front, users overwhelmingly had the most questions about the Xbox 360 and PS3. Coming in third was the Wii and the DS Lite saw the least activity.

Out of all devices, the Xbox 360 saw the most “visits per device” at 188,342 while the iPhone saw 99,000. Oddly, Nokia and Blackberry devices also so a bit of traction as well. Windows itself came in at #4 behind the Wii.

The Coby Kryos was the most problematic tablet followed by the Galaxy Tab.

These sorts of stats are interesting because they offer a window onto what users are thinking about after unboxing their holiday gadgets and finding them lacking or problematic in some respect.

We first covered FixYa, the Q&A site for products, back in 2007, after the startup demoed at the TechCrunch40 DemoPit. Over the course of the next year, FixYa went on to raise $8 million in two rounds from Mayfield Fund and Pitango Venture Capital, with Chamath Palihapitiya joining the board of directors.

It’s been a few years since we’ve tapped into the startup’s progress, but Founder & CEO Yaniv Bensadon told us that the company is now seeing 20 million unique visitors a month, with 650K users having answered questions from the 10 million product problems and solutions currently live on the site. And, since 2009, the company has been cash-flow positive.

As the focus for FixYa has been on growth, on creating genuine, user-generated content that isn’t mashed, collected, or aggregated, on leveraging first users and building a network effect. Bensadon says that SEO was a significant driver for early traffic, as users with specific product problems looking for quick answers to lens issues on their Asus v90 would pop over to Google search to test the Web for answers, and FixYas results would often appear towards the top.

But, over the last six months, FixYa has turned its focus from scaling and growth to providing a user experience that is more appealing, that allows users to take advantage of the wealth of data the startups has collected over the last few years on products.

Like many other consumer web startups, FixYa has turned to widgets and game-ification to make this happen, and is today officially announcing v3.0 of their product. The new FixYa offers a more integrated backend gamified experience for experts who answer product questions, as well as a product engagement barometer, which allows end users to gauge the popularity of specific questions and discussion topics.

Gamification for gamification’s sake is one thing, but FixYa’s integration of badges, levels and rewards to their experts’ dashboards is intended to make experts feel more engaged with the community, as well as to their peers. To this end, the startup has introduced an escalated question flow, based on three levels of expertise they’ve created for their experts.

Their three levels of expertise, the CEO says, have been previously based on that legacy call center approach to customer service. For example, say you call AT&T and can’t get an answer from the first customer service rep you speak to, so you ask to speak to a supervisor. If you can’t get an answer from the supervisor, then you ask to speak to the manager — and so on.

This has worked fairly well for FixYa so far, but as the startup’s mission is to get your consumer electronics questions answered within 24-hours, they’ve added new incentives, and a new workflow. To divvy up the work, FixYa is now posing basic product questions to their newest experts.

Those questions that cannot be answered by the newest members are then passed on (after three hours) to the next level of more seasoned experts. If that question goes unanswered yet again, the question passes to the highest rung of the ladder, those esteemed super experts. If none of them can answer your question, you need to consult an oracle. (Just kidding.)

FixYa is hoping that this new question flow will enhance the promptness and accurateness of the site’s answers and give experts incentive to continue coming back and providing spot-on customer support. The more correct answers they give, the more badges and rewards they receive, and the higher they go. In the meantime, the consumers benefit. (Or at least that’s the hope.)

The site is also officially introducing the Fix-O-Meter, which has been live for about a week now, that is intended to leverage FixYa’s dataset to provide a realtime gauge of product issues, how many people have viewed the product, asked questions, and how many found “helpful solutions” to their problems. Going forward, every product page will get a meter detailing these data points, and Bensadon says that he hopes this barometer will become the equivalent of a consumer report snapshot.

On top of that, FixYa will also be rolling out mobile apps over the coming months to let users get access to solutions for over 2 million products while they’re on the go. Q&A sites can be really hit-or-miss, but with gamification and a new barometer for consumer product issues, the FixYa experience stands to get a lot better. Customer service for consumer electronics has not been “fixed”, by any means, but the site seems to be finding its legs aggregating all of the questions and solutions for popular products out there, and it’s new face could go along way towards making the customer experience enjoyable.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart below). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones.

With its new Product Recommendations Fixya is leveraging the large amount of consumer feedback users are providing about products they already own in order to help other users considering buying the same ones. Recommendations are indicated with an overall thumbs-up/down, along with the number of users whose recommendation was rated as a thumbs-up (Fixya weights the user’s vote on product reliability, ease of use and overall value). There are also written recommendations that help users with deeper insights. The information is all there, but they could do a better job displaying it by taking a cue from Amazon.

The end game, explains CEO Yaniv Bensadon, is to establish a type of Net Promoter Score (which is a measure of customer loyalty) for products and their manufacturers. Assuming it can pull it off and traffic comes flooding in, Fixya can turn on an additional revenue stream by allowing its community of 250,000 experts to offer pre-sale support for a premium—this shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as it already does this with post-sale support. Theoretically should Fixya be able to establish the critical mass necessary, it could form a social commerce network, where consumers collaborate with each other on product-specific issues.

Back to why the VC’s are hot for Fixya. What’s admirable about the company and what keeps it glued to VC’s radars is its revenue potential. Here are a few fun Fixya facts:

• SEO – Due to its spanning across so many products it’s managed to institute some extraordinary SEO juice for itself. I Googled four electronic devices that sat on my desk using their name and the keyword ‘support’ (i.e. ‘hp l1706 support’, ‘seagate freeagent support’) and Fixya came-up in the top 5 results for all.
• Advertising – 50% of Fixya’s revenue comes from a variety of ad formats (ppc, sponsorship and display). Here’s something that blew me away… Again, thanks to its broad product catalog, Google AdSense actually generates real revenue for Fixya. Just how real? They’re generating eCPM’s of $2-3—that’s eCPM, not CPM and on AdSense no less. No one else I know is pulling these numbers off AdSense.
• Premium Support – Fixya facilitates live support between its experts and users. Incidents are priced between $10 and $20 and Fixya cuts a commission for the facilitation.
• Lead Gen – Fixya generates leads for local providers of support, warranties and parts. Commissions is the name of the game here as well.
• Future Directions – In the works are a self-serve ad platform which will allow targeting based on products, categories, brands, and geo-location. Fixya is also planning on white-labeling portions of its services. Doing so will allow it to approach the likes of Sony and offer to reduce costly outsourced tech support by instilling crowd-sourced features (and even generate additional revenue along the way).

So there you have it… A company that is able to transform user-generated content into a money making machine. It’s no wonder that Bensadon smiled and said ‘much higher’ when I mentioned to him that I keep hearing $60M as the company’s expected exit mark. You would be smiling too, wouldn’t you?

The startup, which was in the DemoPit at TechCrunch40, announced a $6 million B round from existing investors Mayfield and Pitango. (It had previously raised $2 million in January, 2007). Fixya already has information on 800,000 consumer products, ranging from electronics to appliances. It also stores a lot of owners manuals in digital form. The site has been growing at a respectable clip. In the U.S., comScore measured 1.5 million unique visitors in February, up 107 percent from the year before (see chart below). Worldwide, comScore estimates 3.7 million unique visitors in January (the company claims 6 million uniques).

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