Posts by Tony Hue

We recently polled readers and commenters about whether or not they pay for online news and why. By examining the current sentiment around paying for news, we hope to provide publishers with insights that will help them build successful businesses supported by loyal, engaged readers. Today, we’re sharing the results of our research and summarizing the feedback readers provided.

Disqus commenters have a lot to say about, well, just about anything really. Discussions on topics ranging from Avengers: Infinity War to Pokémon Go are happening every day across the Disqus network. While recaps of popular discussions are fun to revisit, those discussions have come and gone. What about the discussions that are happening right now or in the near future? Starting today, we’re introducing a new series on the Disqus Blog that will highlight upcoming topics and events where we expect interesting discussions to happen. From major blockbuster movies, popular sporting events, to new tech gadget announcements, we’ve got you covered. At the end, let us know what interesting things on the horizon that looking forward to discussing.

Back in November, we asked readers if they would rather pay for content and never see ads or have all content be free and ad-supported. The poll generated 4,719 votes, with the majority of respondents (80.4%) saying they prefer that all content be free and ad-supported. While it was not surprising to see that most readers preferred that all content be free, nearly 1 in 5 respondents indicated they wouldn't mind paying for content if it meant that they never had to see ads.

It’s not enough to simply add comments to your site and expect a community to emerge. If you want great discussions to happen on your site, you need to participate in the conversation. But how?

Publishers need moderation tools that scale as they grow. We designed our moderation tools specifically to help publishers manage large communities efficiently. Today, we put together 10 practical tips to help you get the most out of these tools, keep discussion quality high, and save you time.

Recently, we polled readers and commenters about the reasons why they downvote comments. While we often get feedback about how downvotes work on Disqus, it’s less common for us to hear about why people downvote comments. By understanding these motivations and goals, this paves the way towards improving how voting works in the future. Today, we’re sharing the results of our research and summarizing the feedback you provided.

Have you seen Avengers: Infinity War yet? If not, please stop reading and don’t come back until you do. Because spoilers, duh. One of the year’s most anticipated blockbuster movies is shattering box office records faster than we can say “Nidavellir..?” Avengers: Infinity War is not only the must-see movie in theaters right now, it has given commenters on Disqus plenty to talk about these last few week (119,293 comments have been posted relating to the movie).

If you’re getting started with learning a new piece of software, it’s sometimes easier to just watch a video that shows you how things work than combing through several help articles.

Before we start, there is something we should state upfront: the ability to downvote comments in Disqus never went away. You can still downvote comments which will affect the order they appear in a discussion when using the Best sort. We simply hide how many downvotes a comment has received and only show the total upvotes.

We know that many publishers use Google Analytics to understand their site's traffic. Perhaps that also includes Disqus Analytics for insights about your readers' engagement. Wouldn't it be convenient if you could capture Disqus commenting activity within Google Analytics? In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to start tracking total new Disqus comments in Google Analytics. Once configured, you’ll be able to measure the number of comments your readers are posting alongside the metrics you already track with Google Analytics such as page views and time on site.

Last month, we asked readers and commenters to tell us why they subscribe to email newsletters. With more publishers investing in growing their email lists, we wanted to hear from you on where you stand. Specifically, we wanted to know if you currently subscribed to any email newsletters and if so, why. Today, we’re sharing the results of that research and summarizing what we learned from the feedback you provided.

If you want to increase reader engagement, knowing how much engagement your content is generating is only half the story. You also need to understand who your audience is to make more informed decisions about your strategy and identify ways to better serve them.