Introducing Disqus Polls for Publishers

In our daily experiences working closely with publishers, they consistently tell us they are always seeking new and exciting ways to engage and expand their audiences.

Up until now, Disqus has focused on creating world-class comment tools for millions of publishers around the world. As the digital publishing landscape continues to evolve, and as competition over audiences’ time and attention grows more fierce, publishers need more tools for building engagement than ever before.

Today, we’re proud to announce that we’re taking a bold new step and officially expanding our publisher toolset to ensure that we continue to meet and surpass this need.

Coming soon: Disqus Polls for Publishers—a new, standalone engagement tool that lets you build interactive polls and embed them directly onto your site–anywhere on your site–in minutes. With Disqus Polls, you can start turning audience engagement into audience enjoyment. Join the waitlist today. 

What you can do with Polls

Disqus Polls let publishers offer their audiences a fun, low-effort way of engaging with their site. With easy poll setup, flexible placements, and user-friendly design, Polls will quickly become essential for publishers looking to grow their arsenal of engagement tools.

Poll setup is a breeze. Via our easy-to-follow Poll Editor interface, you’re able to create interactive polls in 60 seconds or less, choosing from different poll types (single question or multi-question) and answer formats (single choice, multi-select, and more).

Polls also come with custom branding and style features that allow the poll’s look-and-feel to blend in seamlessly with any website. Additional settings allow publishers to maintain poll integrity by requiring users to register or log in to answer each poll—and with full SSO integrations, publishers can boost their first party data and registrations while retaining full control over their user data.

Poll installation is just as easy. Simply place the poll code snippet directly into the page source of any webpage, wherever on the page you want. Responsive design offers publishers maximum flexibility with poll placement—the module will adapt to vertical or horizontal orientation depending on where you’re inserting it (for example, the poll will responsively revert to vertical orientation if you choose to place it in your page’s side-rail).

To make poll installation more automated, Universal Tags enable publishers to deploy new polls without having to update their code each time. Once Universal Tags are inserted into the page source, publishers can deploy new polls directly from the Poll Editor.

Once the poll is live, publishers can access real-time results reporting via their Poll Insights dashboard. Detailed stats and easy-to-read charts and graphs lets publishers drill down into poll-specific metrics as well as zoom out to view cumulative reporting for a birds-eye view of overall audience engagement and sentiment data. Publishers who choose an ad-supported Polls plan (we will be offering ad-free plans for Polls as well) can also access revenue reporting that shows how much revenue Poll ad placements are generating.

Many different ways to use Polls

What can publishers use Polls to ask their audiences? Anything they want.

Publishers can use Polls to:

• Get feedback on publisher content – “Do you want to see more of this type of content in the future?”
• Gain insight into audiences’ general brand awareness and engagement – “Would you be interested in a new newsletter?” 
• Tap into audience behavior intents – “Do you plan to vote in the upcoming presidential election?”
• ... and anything else! Polls give publishers the freedom to engage their audiences however they'd like.

Comments not required—Polls are built to stand alone

Polls are not simply a feature of the Disqus Comments platform—they’re a completely new, standalone product for all publishers to take advantage of, requiring a separate purchase. Publishers who don’t need or want a comment section—or who are using a comment section from another provider—are free to purchase and enjoy Polls on its own.

While Polls are powerful enough to stand alone, we encourage publishers to take advantage of both tools in tandem with each other—in fact, Comments and Polls work best as a 1-2 engagement combo, with Comments as the audience engagement anchor at the bottom of the page and Polls as the low-effort engagement extension that can be placed anywhere on the page. Publishers can even place Polls on their homepage to maximize audience engagement and/or poll ad revenue.

It's best to give your audiences multiple ways to engage; some audiences will prefer engaging with your content via the comment section, while others will choose to engage via Polls—based on what some of our beta publishers have seen, many users will engage with both tools, making Comments & Polls an engagement dynamic duo.

Join the waitlist today—limited slots available  

Polls are coming soon! While we continue to get Polls ready for launch, we’ve built a waitlist for publishers to join to get first in line and gain access to exclusive early-bird discounts for Polls when it becomes available. Don’t miss out–limited slots are available, so we highly encourage you to join the waitlist today and secure your spot. 

This is just the beginning. We’re incredibly excited about this massive milestone for Disqus—as an all-new, standalone product, Polls represent the next step in our effort to build tools that publishers need to continue engaging, growing, and forming stronger bonds with their audiences.

We can’t wait for you to meet Polls. You’ll be hearing from us very soon.