Discovery allows you to more deeply engage your audience and monetize your site’s content at the same time. Read more about Discovery in our blog post and the FAQ below, which includes information on the following topics:
- What is Discovery?
- How Discovery Works
- How Do I Earn Money?
- Discovery Analytics
- Managing Your Discovery Settings
- Advertising Information
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What is Discovery?
What is Discovery in Disqus?
Discovery helps people find new and interesting discussions and stories from within Disqus. Discovery also helps publishers drive increases in internal recirculation and external referral traffic, resulting in increased advertising revenues. Discovery is not just one feature - it is woven throughout Disqus and a driving principle behind our entire platform.
What is the Discovery box?
The Discovery box is our latest discovery feature in Disqus. It is a native place for users to find new discussions, stories and other content on your site and from other sites across the web.
We find that users are very engaged when they arrive at the discussion thread because they are either engaging in the discussion or thinking through where they want to go next. However, this real estate is commonly underutilized by publishers because it’s below the fold. By placing the Discovery box within the discussion thread, we help your most engaged users discover new content while also helping you best optimize your audience monetization.
Why is Disqus moving into content discovery?
We developed our Discovery features (e.g. Community view, the Discovery box) based upon feedback from both our users and our publisher partners. Users trust Disqus and are looking to Disqus to recommend other interesting conversations and stories. Publishers look to Disqus to increase engagement and traffic on their sites. By recommending compelling content to users, our Discovery features keep users on publisher sites longer and, in the case of the Discovery box, also generate revenue for publishers.
How Discovery Works
How is content recommended to users within the Discovery box?
The Discovery box presents highly relevant and personalized content recommendations. We base these recommendations on a few things:
- The current story and discussion that’s on the page.
- Other content on the site and content that others wish to promote.
- What we think would be most interesting to the specific reader.
Will my site content be made available to other audiences?
Yes. Disqus indexes sites based on relevance so if it’s determined that your site content is relevant to another audience, your content may be displayed by other publishers via the Discovery box. In such cases, your content would appear within the Discovery box’s “Recommended for you” section.
Why am I not seeing Promoted Discovery even though it is enabled for my site?
Promoted Discovery will only show when our targeting algorithm determines we have promoted content that would interest your readers. If this is not the case, we will instead point to interesting and relevant organic content that appears on external Disqus-powered sites.
How Do I Earn Money?
Can I earn money via Discovery?
Yes. The Discovery box generates additional revenue for publishers in two distinct ways because it is comprised of two core components: Organic Discovery and Promoted Discovery.
Organic Discovery makes content recommendations either (i) specific to the site your users are on or (ii) from across sites that use Disqus. As a result, Disqus helps organically recirculate traffic within your site and drives new external traffic to you (since links to your content can appear on Disqus-powered sites across the web). Therefore, Organic Discovery leads to increased page views, the ability for you to reach a new audience and, by extension, more opportunities to generate advertising revenues.
Promoted Discovery points users to content that marketers are looking to promote to your audience. As a publisher, you earn a revenue share from Disqus for each click on a promoted content link. Our advertiser partners pay us to distribute this content in relevant places. Disqus has strict content guidelines to make sure we only select high quality stories that are interesting and well written.
Our goal is to provide readers with links to great content, whether organic or promoted. We also arm you with sufficient controls (e.g. site and advertiser blacklist functionality) to make sure the Discovery box meets your needs.
How much should I expect to earn with Promoted Discovery?
The short answer is, it depends. A number of variables (e.g. click-through rate, your traffic, the type of content you create, what advertisers are looking to promote, etc.) will impact your monetization. During this early period, we are constantly adding new advertisers who will be interested in your audience and inventory. Our goal is to build a strong advertising and monetization ecosystem for publishers and advertisers consisting of a highly liquid marketplace.
What is the pricing model with Promoted Discovery?
Publishers who participate in Promoted Discovery earn money on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. For each click on a Promoted Discovery link on your site, you will earn a percentage of the revenue.
What revenue share percentage will I earn?
There is no standard revenue share percentage as these percentages vary depending on costs, content and performance. We will continue to ensure publishers get optimal revenue and traffic benefit.
How and when will I get paid?
Revenue share payments are made quarterly via PayPal. The first revenue share payments from Disqus will occur in Q1 2013.
How do I submit my payment information?
As revenue share payments will initially be made via PayPal, you must provide us with the email address associated with your PayPal account.
- Navigate to the Discovery tab in your Disqus admin.
- In the “PayPal Email Address” field, enter the email address associated with your PayPal account and click “Save Changes.”
Is there a minimum in order to be paid?
Yes. Your site must have earned a minimum of $100.
Discovery Analytics
What metrics will you be reporting on?
We will report on the following key metrics per site:
- Referral traffic - the number of additional visits the Discovery box has brought to your site in the last 7 days
- Revenue earned - cumulative estimated earnings from your visitors clicking on promoted content since October 1, 2012
How do I access Discovery Analytics?
- Navigate to the Analytics tab in your Disqus admin.
- Click the Discovery tab to view your referral traffic and revenue.
Managing Your Discovery Settings
What do I need to do to activate Promoted Discovery?
The good news is Promoted Discovery is built into the new Disqus as a core product feature and, as such, by using Disqus 2012, you immediately get access to the great benefits of Promoted Discovery, such as organic traffic recirculation and monetization.No additional code needs to be deployed and the performance of Disqus will be the high quality experience to which you are accustomed.
How do I make changes to my Discovery Settings?
We believe you should have full control over Disqus' Discovery features.
To configure the Discovery box:
- Navigate to the Discovery tab in your Disqus admin.
- In the “Choose your Discovery level”, select the appropriate setting and click “Save Changes.”
Where can I expect placement of the Discovery box?
Disqus will choose the placement for the Discovery box to optimize referral traffic and revenue for your site. Practically speaking, this means the Discovery box may appear at the top and/or the bottom of the Disqus comment embed.
Advertising Information
Is Promoted Discovery designed to compete with or replace existing ad solutions?
No. Promoted Discovery is meant to be complementary and additive to other advertising on your site. The Disqus commenting environment is unique and underutilized inventory that represents a new opportunity to generate ad revenue from your sites.
What makes Promoted Discovery different than other ad solutions?
People come to publisher sites to read great content. Most advertising, however, distracts them from that activity by trying to convince them to buy a product or fill out a form. Promoted Discovery aligns publishers’ needs with that of the audience, allowing publishers to profit by showing great content that readers will find interesting and is complementary to the core user experience.
What publisher controls do you offer? Can I block individual advertisers?
We offer you several controls to ensure the Discovery box achieves your business goals, including: (i) blacklisting of advertiser domains, (ii) brand safety filters, (iii) click fraud and spam filters and (iv) comprehensive reporting.
Will advertisers be able to target my site specifically?
No. Advertisers may target categories of content but not individual sites in the Disqus network. We offer about 15 such categories that represent the millions of websites that use Disqus.
How do I advertise with Promoted Discovery?
Thanks for asking! We’ll have more to say on this soon. If you’re interested in advertising opportunities with Disqus, please drop us a line at advertise@disqus.com.
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