Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozanonay | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com