Have you heard this before: Every digital content producer should have commenting? You may already be a victim of that mentality and have commenting on your site with no rhyme or reason for it.
The truth is that enabling commenting on articles can be a valuable engagement asset, but it comes with risks and costs. Risk: the invitation for abusive behaviour and trolls resulting in a negative experience for both journalists and audiences. Cost: The time and money required to moderate your comments instead of attending to more productive tasks.
Fearful of the risks and costs, digital publishers are increasingly considering removing commenting from their sites. In some cases, they already have.
Viafoura’s Audience Development Platform provides commenting, moderation, and audience insights for more than 500+ media properties internationally and my personal advice to any organization considering turning off commenting is:
Turn off commenting
Think of it this way: An organization cannot effectively accomplish its objectives without instruments that inform and guide its decisions. I have seen countless organizations trying to engage with their audiences through various social functionalities (like commenting) and failing.
At least once a week I get asked:
I don’t need anything else, can you just give me a commenting tool?
My response to these organizations is that without the ability to inform yourselves about the concrete value that commenting or any engagement tool brings, to your audience and your business, you are choosing to fly blind. In turn I encourage all organizations to ask the following question:
What is the impact of engagement on my audience development goals?
Any digital content producer looking to implement engagement tools, like commenting is setting themselves up for failure if they don’t have the answer to this question first. Developing an audience goes beyond commenting. You need to be able to answer the above question with a concrete and measurable response.
The digital content industry is saturated with tools that provide superficial analytics that focus on vanity metrics. Real insights can only come from workable, well-informed data. The goal of a great analytics platform is to empower digital content producers to inform and evolve a robust audience development strategy. This can only be achieved by looking to discover insights on the impact that engagement (commenting in this case) has on attention time, page views, unique visits, recirculation etc.
Bottom line: If your engagement strategy includes various tools, e.g. commenting, without a clear answer to the above question, then you too should also turn off commenting.
Audience development is not just about commenting, it is about better engaging your audience and being able to quantify the impact on your business metrics.
Jesse S. Moeinifar
Founder & CEO
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