A comment is the first step to a subscription

From anonymous reader to subscriber

What we measure across our major media clients when the discussion appears below an article:

8 readers in 10 stop there. A visible comment area is not a page footer readers skip; it is what they look at after the article.

6 in 10 stay more than ten seconds, and those spend 1 min 30. On a news page, that is reading time gained after the last line of the article, on your site, not on a social network.

For every reader who comments, 21 read the discussion. The discussion is audience content, not a space reserved for those who write.

Whoever comments signs in. It takes an account on your site: single sign-on, no new registration. Every commenter is a known reader in your database, with an email address and a history, the reader your subscription team knows how to work with.

And they come back: nearly two commenters in three comment again the following month. Commenting builds a habit of returning that the article alone does not.

And the discussion earns

As an option: ad placements in the discussion area, sold by your own ad sales team or by ours, in places defined with you. We have been placing ads in news publishers’ comment sections since 2018.

Moderation is handled

The AI reads the article, the comment being replied to and your community guidelines, not just the message on its own: a remark that looks harmless out of context, or harsh but on topic, is judged against what it answers. It decides, and explains every decision.

Three settings, depending on how you are organised:

• The AI moderates automatically.
• With the Enterprise plan, AI settles the clear-cut cases and hands the doubtful ones to an external human moderation team.
• The AI suggests a decision with its reasoning; your moderators decide.

When you turn it on, readers can report a comment from the discussion; a decision is made, and the reader who reported it is informed by email. When a comment is removed, its author sees it in their profile history, with the reason, for twelve months.

The comment area sits directly below the article, in a compact format that stays visible even before the first comment is posted. What a regional daily taught us: a thread readers cannot see does not get comments. Placement comes before any other setting, so we define it with you.

Several sites or titles? Your team manages them from the same back-office account, and each site keeps its own settings, moderators and single sign-on.

You see what it brings in

Your back office tracks activity day by day: most commented articles, most active readers, the readers’ path to their first comment, audience breakdown.

For a group, we add the indicators you need, and detailed activity monitoring, site by site and title by title. Signed webhooks send every event to your own tools: CRM, data, newsletter.

Switch without risk

Moving from Disqus, OpenWeb, Viafoura or another solution? You send us your export, we convert it and import it. Migration is quoted separately, based on the size and format of your history.

The import keeps each comment’s text, date and moderation status, the reply structure and the link to the right article. Comments are linked to your readers’ accounts: to those that already exist, or we import the accounts before the comments, or we link the history to the reader on their first sign-in. Votes and reactions are not imported.

Count on one to two weeks once we have the export. Your readers start commenting as soon as it is installed, and the history lands in the same space, with no downtime. On the technical side, half a day of development to connect your reader accounts: a code snippet on your article templates, whatever your CMS, or the WordPress plugin.

An account manager works with you, the same one from the first call to go-live: the founder of GraphComment.

Compare with the platforms publishers use →

Hosting and compliance

Hosting: European Union (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). Your readers’ data is not resold.

Our data processing agreement is public, so your legal team can read it before the first call.

Data processing agreement →

Frequently asked questions