Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next | Hacker News Reader

Why Disqus Is Winning the Web Comment Battles, and What's Next

louisgray.com

13 pointsbootload23 comments

Can someone please explain to me why is this product worth creating a company (and its subsequent fundings)? I mean... every major blogging platform has the features Disqus offers. Even if this was not the case, creating a company to fill a void that could be filled with a minor software release, why? What's the big deal? What's the advantage in using it? I feel like I'm missing something.

All the comments for posts are aggregated in one place across a number of blogs. IF comments are interesting, then this aggregation may also be interesting.

For people running home brew blog software or people running their own wordpress installs, etc, it may offer a nice decentralized way to avoid spam as well.

I'm not saying it's worth millions, but it doesn't seem entirely useless.

I see them as a sort of FriendFeed that is focused purely on blog comments. I, for one, would be interested in following some people's commenting activity around the web.

How could they make money besides advertising? The WordPress guys or the Six Apart guys might pay for spam-free comments.

I run a small website that hosts wire feeds (AP, Reuters, etc.). When a reader asked for comments, I originally said no b/c building my own infrastructure + spam protection would take way too much time. I heard about Disqus and I literally had comments on every single news article in 5 minutes. This in turn created a forum. Now, I saw little usage of comments and took them down, however, the ease of use was incredible. Basically, if you have a website with content that isn't built on blogging software, Disqus (or InstantDebate) is a quick and easy way to implement comments.

"... every major blogging platform has the features Disqus offers ..."

You have answered your own question. If you don't use "every major blogging platform" that is where Discus comes into it's own. Users want the ability to have commenting but maybe not hosting them. You still get access & own you own data sans the problems & limitations of homegrown or open source blogging software.

Okay, here's some of the reasons that occur to me:

It's not just blogs. It's also new web apps, aggregators, wikis, mashups, and documentation.

Users also get to reuse their avatar/username across multiple sites which might encourage commenting.

It has good nested threading support which most blog software doesn't include for some psychotic reason.

It has good anti-spam which prevents you from needing akismet or defensio integration.

They support video comments now that most blogs won't support.

...

Currently, I'm debating adding it to bug.gd rather than adding new features to our own commenting system. Why reinvent the wheel if we have a tool that does it for us?

The only cons I see right away:

Loss of serch engine benefits of having the comment content hosted on someone else's site.

Risk to your site if it goes down.

I also wonder how it handles incredible traffic.

"I feel like I'm missing something" - You're missing the fact that comments don't have to exist only on blogs. I as able to add Disqus comments to RSSmeme (http://www.rssmeme.com/) and not have to write a single bit of extra code. Very convenient.

I find it fascinating that a tool or startup (no matter how innovative) that is utilized by only 6000 or so Web sites gets so much attention when:

Haloscan, JS-Kit, Sezwho and a score of others dominate this niche.

JS-Kit alone is used by over 50,000 sites and reaches in excess of 20 million people

The entity in question has a nebulous monetization model

This same platform so far has no revenue sharing for publishers

And most importantly Disqus has no viable way to allow publishers benefit from their own content's SEO aspect when their content will reside on Disqus servers.

Disqus is a refined commenting system that in my opinion is designed to be sold to a brand rather than taken to its natural conclusion by Daniel and his team. This is the only logical reason for there not being a monetization or business model in place (or at least in view) and for apparently pirating massive SEO benefit from published comments (Google might like this, or any business that can derive such an SEO bonanza).

It is in Fred Wilson's benefit to see that the world thinks a comment system will replace Google, and this is why you see such assertions (he is in on the investment). I on the other hand represent JS-Kit and have an interest too. So, I suggest you do your investigating and see what the story is for yourselves.

I was one of the first to review Disqus when it arrived om the scene - a great platform and a bright developer. At the time I did not know of any flaws however. These flaws appear to reside in the intentions of the startup toward content, its owners and transparency in my view. Perhaps you should ask the question: "Show me the money" a little more forcefully?

Those other comment systems must be dominating in a very subtle way -- I've never once seen them. On the other hand, I encounter Disqus comments every day.

How could have never seen haloscan?

Where would I see it? Disqus seems to be on half the blogs I read, but I've never even heard of haloscan. (or was your comment sarcastic?)

Ugh, what a bad typo I had there.

Anyway, 5+ million hits:

http://www.google.com/search?q=haloscan

...so, yeah, you should have seen it by now.

Perhaps they're better at customer service than you are. Additionally, even if I ignore the people with a vested interest in Disqus, most of the praise I've heard about Disqus is from people that use it.

This article inspired me to add Disqus to my blog (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-15-now-with-comments...) -- I hadn't bothered until now, but the simplicity (just add a few lines of javascript) convinced me.

Sometimes it's just enough to build a valuable tool that is worth something to someone else...happens in high tech all the time when small one product companies are purchased. Disqus will be valuable for a larger platform that would like to bring in its userbase and believes that time to market is better managed through acquisition. Why does every web startup have to be a $1 billion idea?

I think Louis is right to point out that Disqus' approach to customer service and their generally well-functioning product will lead to serious market dominance, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they'd convert market dominance into positive revenue.

Does anyone have a confident suggestion as to how they'd monetise?

They know who you are and they know what interests you have. This is fertile ground for targeted (i.e. profitable) advertising. Similarly google knows what you are looking for, so they can advertise effectively.

Yes, you have a point, but apparently they're discarding that option.

From the article: "They've definitely had talks about how to monetize and start bringing in money, but if you thought they were about to start with advertising, you'd be wrong. Disqus will not always be a zero-revenue company, but Daniel says advertising's not in the plans."

The information is still valuable. They could expose you to other applications which will interest you and in turn generate profit.

I wasn't playing the role of "investigative reporter" at dinner, so I didn't press here. One of the guesses I have is that the technology used for Disqus could be implemented across corporate intranets, white labeled and licensed?

I think this is a better idea than relying on advertising, but do you think there'd be enough demand for a white label version for it to be the core of their model?

Another approach: Fred Wilson's post today on comments constituting blog posts suggests that maybe they're building towards a sort of blogging platform for non-bloggers, where the aggregate of a user's comments on other blogs would form a new low-maintenance blog (on the Disqus site).

That's an interesting thought. At first, I was thinking what you were suggesting would be very Tumblr-like, but Disqus would centralize your comments elsewhere, and maybe you could opt to pull a subset in to make your new platform?

Precisely. Then add simple tools for categorisation, design customisation and so forth.

The point is that there are probably 10 active commentators for each active blogger. Perhaps Disqus is building towards a platform for people like this, who comment actively but who don't want or think they wouldn't be able to run their own blog.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com