This post is about the latest going-ons with Disqus. A lot has been happening over here, and they all can be somewhat represented with numbers. So, this post is also about the numbers of Disqus.
Four
Four years ago this week, Disqus became a company. We started Disqus because we thought that the concept would be fun to work on. The web is such a wonderful place: we worked on Disqus just because we wanted it to exist. We didn’t even know if anyone else would care.
Five hundred million
Fortunately for us, we discovered that a number of people did care. And today, we’re ecstatic about how high this number has grown. The Disqus network of communities reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors every month. This is across the 750,000 websites using Disqus, with about 35 million users participating on these communities.
Ten million
Startups are all about paying attention to the key numbers, and these numbers keep us going strong. So with that, we’re excited to be announcing the newest number that’s important to us: we’ve just closed a $10 million round with North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. I’m happy to welcome Ric Fulop, our newest investor partner (and repeat entrepreneur), to the team.
Five hundred
With this latest financing, we will be expanding the team, our products, and on building our long-term business. In the last 12 months, Disqus grew at least 500% across all of our core metrics: traffic, users, and communities. In fact, just this past November we announced hitting 200 million uniques/month and we’re now already approaching 500M! We’ve taken our time to carefully build the foundations of our core platform, and it’s allowed us to handle — admittedly with plenty of challenges — the accelerating growth with a small team.
Seventy five
According to a recent study by Lijit, Disqus is used by 75% of websites who use a third party commenting or discussion system. We’re happy to be able to work with some of the top publishers and media properties on the web. Some of our most recent partners include BarackObama.com, Time Magazine, IGN, NASDAQ, PCMag, ReadWriteWeb, and Wired Magazine. Disqus’ business is in our VIP service and the recently launched Add-ons. As we grow the business of Disqus, we’re paying a lot of attention to how audience engagement transforms how people appreciate online content. We hope to establish a strong business in helping websites recognize and build on this value.
Two
We’re building Disqus for two types of users: a) the publishers who use the Disqus platform, and b) regular web users who encounter Disqus on the web. We’re on the verge of releasing some cool, new features for the platform. And we’re just getting started there. We’re also looking forward to spending more time on new ways to make Disqus fun and enjoyable to use for the rest of us web users.
Sixteen
The Disqus team is made up of 16 wonderful people, and we’re hoping to grow that number to follow the growth of our network. Keep an eye on our jobs page for the positions we’re opening up.
We receive lots of feedback and feature suggestions and, while we can’t implement them all, many of our releases have been inspired by the activity we’ve observed. If you use Disqus, either as a blogger or a commenter, please let us know what you’d like to see from us.