Earlier this year we wrote about our plans to release new versions of Disqus with optional advertising and new features to give publishers more options for growing and managing their audiences. We're excited to announce that recently we launched Disqus Pro and Disqus Plus, our first two subscription versions of Disqus.
Disqus Pro: powerful tools to grow, manage, and understand audiences
For large news and media organizations and pro-sumer publishers, Disqus Pro provides additional features aimed at giving publishers more control over their audience and on-site engagement. Along with all of the functionality of Disqus' audience platform and optional advertising, Disqus Pro provides exclusive, advanced features for top publishers and access to priority support from our Publisher Success team.
Advanced Moderation Suite
Our advanced moderation tools give publishers more control over their audience engagement, helping publishers foster high quality engagement, eliminate trolls and spammers, and save time moderating
- Shadow banning: Shadow banning is way of discretely banning users, without their knowledge, in order to avoid instances of troublesome users coming back with new accounts. Shadow-banned users will be able to continue posting normally; however, their posts will not be visible to any other readers.
- Timeouts: Sometimes completely banning a user from commenting on a site is too severe of a punishment and it does not give the user an opportunity to improve their behavior. Timeouts are a way for publishers to temporarily ban users from commenting and provide specific feedback to these users so that they can correct their behavior.
Audience tools for growth
Acquire, understand, and retain loyal readers with Disqus Pro audience tools. Integrate Disqus with your existing analytics and user management system.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): Publishers can seamlessly integrate Disqus with their own user management systems. With SSO, publishers can grow their subscription bases, gather information about commenters, and avoid instances of spam and trolling.
- Advanced Audience Analytics: The Analytics dashboard helps publishers understand how their audience engages with their content over time. The new Content Analysis page allows publishers to see how individual pieces of content are performing with their audiences so that they can optimize their content and audience strategies.
Customize and extend Disqus
Customize the functionality and presentation of Disqus on your site to meet your specific data needs and branding requirements.
- Unlimited API Access: Utilize the Disqus API without limits to build custom applications like user profiles, leaderboards, comment feeds, and more and ingest data not provided out-of-the-box with Disqus Analytics.
- Remove Disqus branding: Customize the look and feel of Disqus on your site by removing Disqus branding, providing a unique commenting experience.
The Disqus Pro plan is available now for $99 per month.
Disqus Plus: optional advertising
We know that the Disqus advertising that supports the Basic, free-to-use version of Disqus is not the right fit for all publishers. That's why we created Disqus Plus, a subscription version of Disqus that gives larger publishers the ability to remove Disqus advertising. Disqus Plus is available for $10 per month and gives publishers the ability to opt out of advertising.
For smaller, non-commercial publishers who make us over 95% of our network, Disqus Plus will be available as a free option.
In the coming months we are excited to release more features and functionality both for the free-to-use Disqus platform and the new Disqus Pro plan. We are currently investing in:
- Audience Ownership: When we speak with publishers something that comes up frequently is their reliance on social platforms like Google and Facebook for traffic. Publishers are worried about having to bend to the rules of these platforms in order to promote their content and drive traffic. We are currently working on ways to give publishers more control and ownership over their audiences on their sites.
- Combating toxic content: We are working on more internal tools as well as partnering with third parties such as Google's Perspective, in order to better equip publishers to identify and combat hate speech and other toxic content.