Company Blog

Promoted Discovery: A Preliminary Report Card

In October, to a limited number of publishers, Disqus introduced Promoted Discovery. We’re excited about it because it’s a way to grow our business while serving three core constituents of Disqus: readers, publishers and advertisers. We help readers find new discussions and stories. We give advertisers the opportunity to engage with this audience through promoted content. We share the resulting revenue with our publishers. All of this is delivered natively in the underutilized but highly engaged real estate of the discussion.

At Disqus, we think of content discovery as a better way for people to find stuff worth talking about. Our world of online community and discussion is self-selecting and organized around common interests, lending itself naturally to discovery. Increasingly, online communities are the places people go to find new content as traditional social networks become less dynamic.  

Our consideration of this part of our business has two key components. First, we know that Disqus users are different than the average Internet user. They are by definition in the conversation and more hungry for new content. In an analysis of organic discovery traffic, Disqus users viewed 56% more pages and spent 166% more time on site on average. Our audience leans forward and engages.   

Second, by powering discussion on nearly two million websites we can serve both large and niche publisher sites in ways few others can.  Using a native advertising approach, we also reach the mobile web without disruption. And in turn, we help advertisers find their target audiences, wherever they consume content. We have reach that’s tough to beat.  

Results To Date

For Readers
People that use Disqus are part of the Internet’s largest community of communities. No matter what their interests are and as their interests change, Disqus gives people the opportunity to find new communities, content and people. We see strong engagement in both organic (unpaid) and promoted content. This demonstrates that our mix of content complements the user experience and enhances the value readers and publishers get from Disqus.

For Advertisers
Most advertisers have traditionally had to trade audience quality for quantity. Our initial performance data shows that is no longer the case. In this subset of the Disqus reach, we serve over 5 billion ads per month across 1.5 billion monthly pageviews, with both numbers showing strong growth month-to-month, as we further expand the program. Our initial group of advertisers includes MTV, American Express, Citibank and Intel among others. Advertisers using Promoted Discovery to drive traffic to their sites see Disqus outperform similar traffic sources by factors of 2-3x in areas where it matters most: page consumption, time spent and numbers of comments and shares. But the number we’re most pleased with is our renewal rate: 94% of our initial advertisers have committed budget to us for 2013.

For Publishers

In the short time we’ve been at this, we’re pleased with what we’ve seen. 10,000 publishers are participating with more joining every day. And it’s a representative, broad spectrum of the web and Disqus itself.  This includes sites like Investopedia, Men’s Health, Bossip, New York Observer, and Smart Mom Style just to name a few. For our publishers, Promoted Discovery is an integrated way for them to recirculate traffic back to their site, provide relevant content recommendations and make money. They’re seeing increased flows of quality traffic and strong engagement in recommended content. Across all Disqus channels, we’re sending millions of referral site visits to publishers every week.

As we enhance the product and advertiser demand continues to increase we’ll be offering this to more publishers on a rolling basis. In the meantime, revenue payments to our initial publishers are being delivered in Q1.

Getting to Scale

The next phase of Promoted Discovery is about achieving scale in balance. Enhanced content targeting, broader publisher inventory and more control tools are all part of getting us there. We’ll ramp up in direct proportion to our ability to deliver success and a high quality experience for our readers, publishers and advertisers alike.

Stay tuned for more news in this space from Disqus.

Coloring Outside the Lines: Hacking at Disqus

A wiseman once said “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We like our play at Disqus. So earlier this month, for the first time ever, we decided to take a little break from the usual. We put our regularly scheduled programming on pause and spent a week decoding the future of Disqus. We stepped outside our normal day-to-day and looked at what participation and discussion could look like in the future (or the end of the week, whichever came first.) 

Disqus Hack Week was an opportunity for our teams to show, not tell, how great their ideas are. This week-long stretch allowed everyone in the company to show off their design, development, analysis, and testing chops in small teams. Each team included reps from engineering, design, infrastructure, customer support, business development and operations. This is a look at just a few of the things we cooked up.

Discovery
Disqus is the world’s largest network of conversations. By powering discussion on two million websites, we have our pulse on what people are talking about, all around the world. What if we could show you the most interesting discussions happening at any given moment? Several teams dialed into this opportunity and built products that surface the most interesting and trending discussions. Here’s a look at one:

Local
Disqus today is about conversations happening on the web. What if those conversations could include the places and things around you? In a mobile environment, the form and function of discussion changes. A restaurant could become the subject of debate. A concert the experience everyone wants to talk about. Disqus Local began our exploration into this world. With a working prototype up by weeks end, it may have even saved a few lives in our post-hack excursion to Vegas that weekend.

Media
The web is a playground for the artist in all of us. (Even cat pics count here.) But traditional online discussions are read-only. What if you could color in your conversation? One team explored bringing a more visual experience to discussion. A picture says a thousand words:

If you’re like us, you’re a big believer that people just want to be heard and technology continues to open up new and exciting ways for them to do that. And everyday from outside and in, we hear great ideas on how to use Disqus in original ways. Keep them coming. In 2013, we’ll be reigniting Disqus Labs. We’ve just scratched the surface on what we could build together. Look out for some of these new features to trickle into the core Disqus product or show up on our upcoming labs page.

Want to come hack with us? Take a look at our jobs page to see how you can bring these and your own ideas to life.

Introducing Disqus Digests

We’re excited to announce the release of Disqus Digest emails.

Digests provide updates from Disqus on the conversations and people you care about most, combined into a single daily or weekly email.

Digest emails are designed to provide a quick view into Disqus conversations which are relevant to you. They include article headlines, publisher information, a selection of some of the best comments, and links to jump from your inbox right into the discussion.

We hope Disqus Digests keep you up to date on the most relevant discussions without cluttering your inbox, the way instant email notifications might.

So, how do we determine which discussions and people you care about most? Well, we look for a few things:

Starred discussions

When you star a discussion, we’ll be sure to include updates from that discussion in your Digests.

Speaking of stars, we’re also pleased to announce an update to the Disqus star button. We’ve simplified its design and function, and think you’ll find it easier to use.

Friends activity

Let your friends help you find great discussions from around the web. When someone you follow participates in a discussion, we’ll let you know about it in your Digest emails.

You can easily follow others from any Disqus thread by hovering over a user’s avatar and clicking “Follow”.

Replies to your comments

Whenever you receive a reply to a comment, we’ll include the reply and updates from the discussion in your Disqus Digests.

Improving notifications

Disqus Digests are just one step toward more comprehensive, less intrusive email notifications. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share on Disqus Digests, please let us know here, or feel free to comment below.

Like other Disqus emails, you can unsubscribe or reduce the rate at which you recieve Digests by adjusting your notification settings.

Interested in learning more? Please visit Digest FAQs.

Please note: we’re rolling out Digest emails to everyone over the next few weeks, so keep checking your inbox if you don’t see Disqus Digests immediately.

What’s New for the New Disqus

We’re proud to announce a suite of enhancements to the new Disqus. Based on feedback from thousands of communities, these changes help Disqus comments natively adapt to a broader range of site designs, community management styles, and languages.

The new Disqus has always adapted visually to fit a range of site color schemes, automatically picking up on the background and link colors. Font style is a new appearance feature and comment text will switch to a serif font when appropriate. All appearance options are also now available as manual overrides in the admin settings, including a new feature to emphasise moderator comments with custom badge text. You can see we’re now using the “Disqus Team” badge here on our blog.

New font style, color scheme, and mod badge controls.

Today we’re rolling out a core change to the community rules: downvoting a comment is now reserved for users who are logged in. We’ve also reorganized the community rules in the site settings page, making it clearer how to configure whether guest users can comment on your site and whether to send certain types of comments to pre-moderation. 

Downvoting is now for signed-in users only.

Disqus powers communities all around the globe. Full localization is now supported in the new Disqus for 7 languages: French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish. See additional detail about Disqus localization and forthcoming language support.

That’s not all. We’ve enhanced other elements of the core comment interface—including a new hover state to show the absolute timestamp—and there’s more to come. See the release notes for the complete breakdown of recent changes.

Publishers using the new Disqus have experienced the results we built it to produce: more engagement, increased traffic and better discussion. Don’t have the new Disqus and want to try it out for yourself?

We’re always looking for feedback. Let us know what you’d like to see next in the comments below.

Evolving My Disqus

Today we’re announcing the first of a series of updates to the My Disqus tab. Disqus 2012 introduced My Disqus view as a more obvious way to see replies to your comments and follow updates from commenters you care about. It’s one of several features in Disqus 2012 that help users return to conversations and move across the network.

Here’s a quick look at how we’re making My Disqus even more useful.

My Disqus is now home to two child tabs, Network activity and Notifications. 

Network activity is now grouped by and anchored to a discussion topic. Not only does this give each activity item more context, but we feel it also makes them much more enjoyable to read. 

The Notifications tab is an inbox of activity related to you. Notifications are now persistent even if you reload the page.

Since it’s a personalized experience, only users who log into Disqus see the My Disqus tab. If you’re not seeing it in the comments below, just connect with your Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or Google account to give it a try.

We’re just beginning to explore this side of our product and would love your feedback. How we can make My Disqus more useful to you?