The “pivot to community”

After abandoning their website comments sections, many publishers are reconsidering how they should interact with their audiences.

Image licensed from Getty Images

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The “pivot to community”

If you worked for a digital publisher sometime between the years 2004 and 2018, there was a phrase that you heard so often that it became its own form of industry dogma: “Don’t read the comments”

It was a sneering refrain, one that designated the comments section of any news site as the backwaters of the internet, the “No-Man’s Land” where trolls went to breed. For the most part, the editorial staff didn’t venture into the comments, and what little moderation the comments section had was often facilitated through automated content filters. 

And then, beginning in 2013 or so, publishers announced they were shutting down their comments sections entirely. Here’s a small sampling:

2013: “Why [Popular Science is] Shutting Off Our Comments”

2014: “Reuters Kills Comment Sections,” “Online comments [at CNN] are being phased out”

2016: “NPR Website To Get Rid Of Comments,” “We're Getting Rid of Comments on VICE.com”

2018: “The Atlantic is killing its comments in favor of a new Letters section to showcase reader feedback,” “ESPN.com’s comment section is gone, and the sports world is a slightly better place because of it”

That’s just what I got from a few minutes of Googling. When announcing the closure of comments sections, publishers often cited the same reasons — trollish behavior, the lack of moderators, the shift to social media discussion — but I argued in a 2019 column that those problems weren’t insurmountable:

Did comments sections invite trollish behavior? Yes. Did moderating that behavior require both editorial and technical resources? Also yes. But deploying these resources was worth the cost, as it would have resulted in publishers maintaining a stronger relationship with their readerships. Instead, much of the news media became commoditized, with news outlets placing more emphasis on drive-by Facebook traffic than serving loyal readers. In pursuing this strategy, publishers placed more distance between themselves and their users, and so they were ill-equipped when digital advertising models collapsed and platforms like Facebook siphoned off their traffic.

I remember getting some pushback on Twitter for this argument — with several people gleefully pointing out that the outlet that published my column didn’t allow reader comments — but I think it’s aged extremely well.

In fact, I keep seeing more and more publishers pivot back toward communities. In some cases, they leverage online forums to collect rich first party data that can be utilized in ad targeting. But I’ve also noticed that many publishers — especially those within the Creator Economy — are offering gated access to communities as a perk for paid subscribers.

Most of the major community platforms have taken notice. Just in the last few months alone, Discord rolled out membership options for its servers, Facebook Groups launched subscriber-only tools, and Substack introduced new community features. Not only are publishers now reading the comments, they’re dedicating real time and resources toward interacting with their most devoted audience members. 

So let’s say you want to launch a community of your own, either as an audience engagement tool or a subscriber perk. What are some of the challenges and strategies you should consider, both in terms of choosing the right platform and ensuring that your audience actually derives value from it? 

Let’s run through a few of them:

Solving the “ghost town” problem

A lot of publishers want to offer message board access as a subscriber perk, but when the new subscriber goes to log in, they find a ghost town with very little organic discussion. It’s like buying tickets to a VIP club and then finding the dance floor empty. It’s a quick road to subscriber churn.

So how do you avoid this? Don’t launch a paid community right away. Instead, offer it as free service to your audience. And then, once the community is generating a sufficient volume of daily discussion, you can grandfather in the current members and then gate off access to paying subscribers. Does that mean there will be non-paying freeloaders in your community? Sure, but that’s a fair trade off it means the community will provide more value for future subscribers.

Building daily habits

Every now and then a friend or colleague is kind enough to invite me into their private Slack group. I’m usually all gung ho about it at first, but within a few days Slack has fallen out of my website rotation, and I never visit the group again.

That’s because Slack isn’t a natural part of my media diet. I never used it for work, so it never became an addiction for me. The average internet user visits only a handful of homepages on a regular basis, and it can be extremely difficult to entice them into adding a new platform or app into their daily habits.

This is why you see many publishers launch communities on platforms that are already popular. I run my community on Facebook Groups, for instance, because there are 2 billion people who fire up the Facebook homepage every day. If your publication is geared toward tech or media workers, then Slack might be the best option. Gaming enthusiasts tend to hang out on Discord, and Reddit would be a good home for any publisher that covers internet/pop culture. You should generally try to choose a community platform that already caters to your existing audience.

The threat of the algorithm

Of course, there’s another side to that coin — that the social platforms with the largest user bases tend to utilize algorithms that can either amplify or choke off reach. This is why many publishers don’t bother with Facebook Groups; they know all too well that it would only take a single shift in Mark Zuckerberg’s priorities for their reach to be wiped out in favor of whatever shiny new object Facebook is chasing.

This is why many publishers opt for more decentralized platforms like Slack and Discord. While these companies do practice some moderation, they’re more hands-off in terms of governing content, and the message board’s owners wield most of the moderation power. 

Deciding how to gate access

Offering community access as a paid subscriber perk can be tricky, because it requires that you both authenticate the identities of new subscribers and then kick them out of the group once their subscription lapses.

For many free platforms, you have to do all of this by hand, which can be extremely time consuming. Depending on the volume of subscriptions you handle, you may want to choose a community platform that integrates with your CRM and automates the process of onboarding and offboarding subscribers. Some membership platforms have built-in integrations with community platforms. For instance, Patreon has an integration with Discord which makes it extremely easy for you to “[sync] your Discord server roles with your Patreon tiers to grant exclusive server access and permissions.”

Choosing threads vs live discussion

I would divide internet forums into two categories.

The first category organizes discussion into threads. For instance, someone posts an opinion to a Facebook Group, and then people can comment on that post. The same dynamic applies to Reddit posts, with users being able to vote up or down on individual comments. The comments with the most upvotes float to the top.

Then there are platforms like Slack and Discord that center around live discussion. While the moderators can create separate rooms devoted to individual topics, these sites operate more like chat rooms, with an emphasis on real-time conversation.

Both categories have their pros and cons. Live discussion platforms are great for real-time chat, but they can be difficult to follow for users who only dip into the community occasionally. I’m probably not the only person who doesn’t enjoy scrolling up through hundreds of messages just so I can find the context of a discussion.

Threaded forums aren’t ideal for real-time conversation, but they’re great at elevating expertise and high quality comments around specific topics. And they’re extremely easy to scan through if you’re a community member who’s only dipping into the forum once or twice per day.

***

This piece mainly focused on the technical aspects of jumpstarting a community; I should probably devote a future newsletter to discussing ways that publishers can actually participate in their forums. Building the infrastructure is only half the battle; the best publisher-centric communities are the ones where the content creators themselves play an active role. Watch this space for more!

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Why Brandi Kruse left her lucrative TV news career to launch her own podcast

In terms of career advancement, Brandi Kruse was at the top of her game. As a TV news correspondent in the large media market of Seattle, she was paid more than most of her industry peers, and she even hosted her own longform weekly talk show. 

But in late 2021, she quit her job and immediately launched her own podcast called Undivided. Within weeks of the launch, she amassed over 2,000 paying subscribers on Patreon, and she now delivers her commentary and interviews to over 200,000 followers across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

How did Brandi find this audience, and why did she ditch her well-paying job in TV? In our interview, she explained how she grew a large following on Facebook and used it as a launching pad for her independent career. She also told me about her efforts to expand beyond local news and into national politics.

To listen to this conversation, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts. iTunes/ Stitcher/  Overcast/ Spotify/ Google/ YouTube/ Audible

Quick hits

Walk-through guides are a huge business for video game news websites. [Vice]

Conde Nast's turnaround continues to be impressive, and it's a reminder that not all "pivots to video" were a failure. [Axios]

"What these data taken together all suggest is that the inexorable march to the mainstream for podcasting has not been an unfettered climb, but rather a case of continually moving three steps forward and two steps back." [Sounds Profitable]

The New York Times's paywall uses machine learning to predict the number of free articles you'll need to read before converting into a paid subscriber. [NYT]

Morning Brew is signing custom deals with creators that allow them to maintain some level of independence. [Axios] This is the future: media companies will increasingly operate more like talent agencies.

I've actually thought about subscribing to DALL-E and using its AI-generated art to illustrate my articles, but it's interesting to think through the implications of what this means for human artists. [Bloomberg]

What do all of these headlines have in common?

Headline 1: “Where are the newsletter ad agencies?”

Headline 2: “The significance of MrBeast’s 100 million subscriber milestone”

Headline 3: “Should you publish multiple podcasts to the same feed?”

Headline 4: “How this newsletter evolved over the last eight years”

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