Volume 3 of our What We’re Reading blog series coming at you hot🔥 To refresh your memory, this series highlights our favorite news, posts, and reports relevant to digital publishing to help our publishers, readers, and blog subscribers stay up to date with the latest info. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Volume 1 and Volume 2 for additional reads. And, as always, we love hearing your thoughts, so don’t hesitate to share your opinions about these articles and any others you’ve found of value. Now... let’s dive in!

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.

In an ever-changing digital environment, publishers regularly face variability and uncertainty when it comes to distributing content, driving traffic, and building audiences. Avenues that were once successful are no longer producing the same results. Particularly challenging for many publishers this year has been the loss of traffic associated with Facebook’s News Feed changes. Prior to the changes, Facebook was responsible for over 40% of all external referral traffic, and many publishers relied on them to stay afloat. Now, however, across the board there's around ½ as much referral traffic coming from Facebook. Some publishers are experiencing even greater cuts; LittleThings, for example, lost 75% of influencer and organic traffic after the algorithm changes, causing the site to shut down😨.

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?

At the beginning of the week, we asked readers to share their predictions for the 2018 World Cup. Since then, 16 teams have been knocked out, and 16 are moving onto the next round. If you thought the group phase was intense (and shocking… cough cough, Germany), prepare yourself for the next set of games; with the sudden death stage of the tournament upon us, competition will certainly be heating up🔥.

Every four years, the FIFA World Cup captivates the globe (in 2014, there were 3.2 billion viewers😱) in a tournament so exciting and spirited that people can’t help but drop what they’re doing to watch. This year’s World Cup is no exception, as football enthusiasts everywhere are pulling out all the stops to watch their favorite teams battle through the opening group phase. Loyal fans are getting up early, staying awake late, live-streaming games to their phones (which may not seem like dedication, until you think about the ensuing data bill), and even playing hooky from work. With only ten matches left in this round, the next three days are guaranteed to be action-packed as each team fights to be one of the sixteen moving forward.

It’s summer and you know what that means: evening barbecues, weekends at the beach, and most importantly, summer interns! This summer, Disqus welcomes four awesome interns (myself being one of them) for a ten week program full of learning, innovation, hard work, and fun.

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).