Media Outlets Build Business and Community With Online Comments

Although Quillette operates on a considerably smaller scale than The Guardian both outlets have come to rely substantially on contributions from readers amp8212 a strategy that attracted considerable notice this year when the Guardian finally broke even and quotmade a small operating profitquot thanks to reader donations Quillette however has decided to offer something in return or withhold something to nonpayers depending on how one looks at it for those who make that donationThe idea of charging readers to comment on news or opinion articles is not exactly new But previously the reason for such proposals had more to do with policing profane or irrelevant comments rather than using commenting as a revenue stream Inappropriate comments have been a longstanding issue for news sites Initially concerns were directed towards anonymous comments such as the 2010 statement from the American Journalism Review quotIt is time for news sites to stop allowing anonymous online commentsquotAlthough anonymous comments may indeed carry a special type of negativity requiring users to log in to comment did not appear to be a complete solution Beginning with Popular Science in 2013 over the following two years many news sites amp8212 from The Verge to Reuters to CNN amp8212 removed their comments sections entirely primarily citing trolling and the resourceintensive process of moderating each commentIt is worth noting that in addition to these widelystated reasons for phasingout comment sections some commentators including the conservative writer Allum Bokhari have argued that the decision was more the result of a damagecontrol efforts by publishers whose brands were being negatively impacted by readers challenging the content of articles or the publication39s editorial direction Lending credence to this view are findings from a Washington Postamp8211 and USA Todayamp8211led study which indicated a relationship between critical comments from readers and diminished respect for an outlet39s brandIn any case following the wave of shuttering comments sections between 2013 and 2015 entrepreneur Michael Robertson launched SolidOpinion in 2016 aiming to introduce some paid comments to news sites By creating comments sections where users could pay for their comments to appear higher than those of nonpayers Robertson sought to dually introduce publishers to an additional revenue source while also providing the funds to subsidize the laborintensive process of moderating comments He managed to recruit Tribune Publishing the owner of the Chicago Tribune and at the time the Los Angeles Times as an early customer Although Robertson39s company did not succeed to the degree he may have hoped it did continue to explore this idea that commenting could be a source of revenue for publishersThis is all to say that Quillette39s 2019 decision to monetize its comments section has some precedent and it coincides with similar thinking at major outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Both publications have articulated strategies to leverage their comments sections towards increasing engagement in May 2019 the Wall Street Journal reported a 5 percent increase in both the number of people reading comments and the number of readers commenting themselves as a result of modifications to its commenting policy Both the Wall Street Journal and the Times have emphasized that they see their comments sections as related to this idea of building communities ie loyal customer bases among their readersThe effort to leverage comments should also be seen in the context of publishers increasingly seeking innovative revenue streams This includes the Wall Street Journal39s marketing of WSJhosted lectures and even vacations and the onceproposed New Republic coffee shops as well as the morewidely adopted merchandising strategy amp8212 something Quillette has pursued with alacrityUnderlying all of these new strategies is this notion of a community associated with a news outlet Quillette for instance describes Quillette Circle as an online community The same is true of the podcasting platform Ricochet which bills itself as a community of likeminded thinkers Its revenue strategy asking said likeminded thinkers to pay to take part in discussions on the siteamp160amp160This onlinecommunity thinking appears tailormade for today an era marked by everincreasing reports of a loneliness epidemic The British government even appointed an actual Minister for Loneliness in 2018 So it39s little wonder people would look towards the Internet for connections with others social networking being the foremost exampleThis brings us to an important point Closely related to this idea of publishers pushing for quotonline communitiesquot whether or not they see it is an effort to fight back against big tech sites such as Facebook that have come to suck up so much of publishers39 revenueAt the time when publications were closing their comments sections around 2013amp82112015 many cited that an additional reason was that so many discussions were taking place on social media anyway And furthermore that Facebook and Twitter were actually the more appropriate venue for such conversations However given the degree to which some publishers most famously Mic have lived and died by the whims of big tech39s algorithms it would make sense to want to bring conversations back to outlets39 own URLsThere39s some evidence to suggest however that no matter what big tech is always one step ahead for instance the New York Times39 comments system Moderator quotwas created in partnership with Jigsaw a technology incubator that39s part of Alphabet Google39s parent companyquot So the revenue dance between publishers and big tech continues with comments sections being perhaps just another point along the wayClick the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Media Outlets Build Business and Community With Online Comments

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Erich J. Prince

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