Last week I sat down with Disqus CEO, Daniel Ha. Here’s that video where he explains the new real-time features (among others) that were just turned on this morning. Including on this blog. This means you can comment and “chat” with other commenters without reloading the page.
A couple of weeks ago I sat down with Disqus competitor, JS-Kit, and got their view of real-time comments. We were the first site to use their real-time commenting feature, named Echo.
But now it’s clear that there’s a rift coming. See, these features keep you from refreshing the page to participate in comments. That will dramatically reduce the page views, which will reduce the amount they collect from advertisers (I don’t have those problems, cause I don’t have advertising like that on my site).
The thing is, over on building43 we saw engagement increase dramatically. On that post we saw a 10x increase in time spent on page. Overall we’ve seen the time spent on page increase about 3x.
Which shows we need a new way to get paid for advertising. No longer is refreshing the page important. That’s the old way of paying for advertising. The new way? How much engagement you have on the page.
The problem is that the advertisers won’t figure this out for some time. New companies, like Seattle’s Adometry, are coming that will help them figure this out (more later this week when I get a video up from them).
Anyway, it will be interesting to see which publishers choose not to turn on these real-time features. That will tell me who has business models to protect.
