Starting in March 2017, Disqus will now be charging a monthly fee to remove ads from your WordPress comments. This is something that has always been free to disable in the past and is a pretty big change that will affect thousands of businesses and bloggers who rely on Disqus to power their comments. Today we’re going to dive into what all this entails, some pros and cons, and some recommendations if you choose to look into an alternative commenting system. It’s important to note that Disqus ads also affect the performance (speed) of comments on your WordPress site.
- What is Disqus?
- Disqus Ads Crossroads
- Disqus Pros
- Disqus Cons
- Disqus Alternatives
What is Disqus?
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Disqus, it’s a service designed to improve comments and discussions on the web. It was originally developed by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan and launched in 2007. It’s actually been around for over a decade. So when it comes to working with the WordPress commenting ecosystem , they’re not new.
Many WordPress businesses and blogs use the Disqus WordPress plugin because it extends the feature set of native WordPress comments . Features like powerful moderation and management tools, spam filtering, blacklists, email notifications, and well-designed comments are just a few of the reasons why it has become popular over the years.
According to the WordPress repository, it’s currently active on over 200,000 sites. And the plugin itself is fairly actively maintained, even though it only has a 3.2 out of 5 stars. Here are some large companies and high-traffic sites that indonesia email list currently use Disqus:
- Wired
- PBS
- Tuts+
- Search Engine Roundtable
- The Atlantic
- Rolling Stone
- Droid Life
- SlashGear
- 9to5Google
- Scotch.io
- Laracasts
According to their company page, they currently handle 50 million monthly comments, 17 billion monthly page views, and are on sites in 191 different countries. BuiltWith also shows that a large majority of these sites are located in the Disqus Ads Are United States.
Disqus Ads Crossroads – To Pay or Not to Pay
In January, Disqus made the official announcement on their blog that they will start charging if you want to remove ads , along with some other changes they have planned for 2017 and the future of their commenting system.
Yes! The basic Disqus service will always be free to use. Publishers can install Disqus on their sites at any time, for free, using a plugin or universal code. The basic version of Disqus is supported by advertising. Ads are powered by Disqus’ Reveal system, which is highly configurable and allows publishers to choose between different ad positions.
We understand that ads may not be right for every publisher and every site. For these publishers, we will will netflix dominate the entertainment world? provide a simple option to remove ads entirely. For a low monthly fee, publishers will be able to completely remove ads and take advantage of all of Disqus’ core features and functionality. We will publish finalized pricing for this offering soon. — Disqus
According to some recent updates and anhui mobile phone number list Disqus Ads Are communications, it looks like it’s going to cost $10/month to remove Disqus ads . These changes are expected to be fully rolled out by March 2017. For larger sites and businesses this might not be a big deal. However, for smaller and mid-sized sites, this might make you wonder whether you really want to keep Disqus or not. At first it seems a bit silly to pay to remove ads on a system that’s been free for the past decade.