.png)
Publishers today face a familiar set of challenges. Platforms are sending less traffic, audience attention is harder to keep, and engagement on owned properties matters more than ever. Over the past year, we have heard the same themes repeatedly from our partners. They want simple, lightweight ways to keep readers on-site without adding work for their teams.
Comments have always been the engagement anchor for Disqus. Today, we are excited to share the next evolution of that experience. A new auto-generated poll unit that lives directly inside Disqus comments for publishers who support ads and gives every visitor an easy way to interact.
This new feature brings a quick, highly interactive engagement moment to the top of your comment section with no redesign, no new templates, no extra logins for your readers, and no additional cost for ad-supported publishers.
What this new poll experience is
Within the Disqus comments, readers will see a rotating set of single-question polls tailored to your content and audience. Each poll is designed to be fast to answer, easy to understand, and meaningful to your audience.
By default, the system uses the publisher content vertical you have already provided to generate relevant question sets for your site. Entertainment publishers see entertainment-focused questions, News publishers see news-focused questions, and so on. For publishers who want deeper alignment with each article, there is an option to enable contextually generated questions. When contextual-based is enabled, Disqus considers article content across your site and creates questions based on it.
The result is a small but powerful engagement moment that feels more relevant and enticing to your readers.
How it behaves for your readers
The experience for readers is intentionally simple. A poll appears at the top of the comment section. The reader chooses an answer, sees the results, and may be presented with another question during the same visit. There is no need to create an account or log in, and the flow does not interrupt the comment experience.
Questions rotate across sessions so that returning visitors are not repeatedly shown the same prompt. Once a reader has completed the available questions for that cycle, the unit transitions to a results view to keep the functional space rather than leaving it empty.
Because the poll lives inside the comment embed, it reaches users as they decide whether to scroll away, start reading comments, or join the discussion. It gives even quiet readers a low-effort way to participate.
Why this matters for publishers
First, it increases engagement on pages that already have traffic but may not have active comment threads. Many visitors will never write a comment, but a single tap on a poll option feels easy and inviting.
Second, it supports longer sessions. Poll interactions encourage readers to pause, react, and then continue reading the page. For publishers who also utilize our Recommendations module, the two work together to create a natural loop. The poll captures a quick reaction at the top of the comments, and recommendations help guide the reader to the next piece of content.
Third, it adds a new high-value ad placement. The poll module includes an adjacent ad unit. That placement is both visible and brand safe, creating incremental inventory without asking you to change your layout or carve out new space on the page.
Finally, it does this without adding work for your editorial or product teams. Once enabled, polls are generated automatically. As mentioned, Contextual polls can be turned on or off. You decide whether you want article-based questions, vertical-based questions, or a mix, and we take care of the rest.
How this differs from Disqus Polls
Many publishers are already familiar with Disqus Polls, our standalone product that lets you build and customize polls and place them anywhere on your site. That tool is designed for manual creation, flexible placement, and complete control over the question, answer options, branding, and timing.
The new comment-based poll experience is different in a few crucial ways.
These polls are auto-generated rather than manually built. They live inside the comment embed rather than as a separate module you place in your templates. They’re optimized for speed and volume rather than long-form, multi-question campaigns. Lastly, they’re designed to work as an ad-supported unit that boosts both engagement and revenue.
If you want to design your own polls for specific campaigns, sponsored content, or editorial initiatives, Disqus Polls remains the right tool. If you want a continuous, low-lift layer of interaction inside every comment section, the new auto-generated polls for Disqus Comments are built for that use case. Many publishers will choose to use both.
Control and Moderation
We know that control matters. Publishers do not want surprising experiences appearing on their pages.
For that reason, the new poll unit is controlled at the publisher level. You ultimately choose whether you want to turn it on or off. You also select whether contextual article-based generation should be on or off. If you prefer to keep things simple at first, you can start with vertical-based questions only and layer in article-specific questions later.
Moderators and admins also play a role. When a moderator is logged in, they will see tools to flag and remove any poll that does not feel right for their community. The goal is to give you the benefits of automation while preserving human judgment where it matters.
What's next
The new Poll experience for Disqus Comments is now live across ad-supported publishers. You can review the available settings and controls at any time in Publisher Admin. To learn more about setup and best practices, visit our Knowledge Base article.
We’re excited to see how publishers use Polls to spark more moments of interaction and engagement within their communities.