Case Study: Raw Story
Challenge

Raw Story is a news site delivering investigative reporting, breaking news, and opinion columns to over six million monthly readers. They focus on politics—and we all know people have much to say about that topic. 

And that’s what led Raw Story to seek new ways to engage their online community of passionate readers who are enthusiastic—and opinionated—about all things politics. Given that this is a controversial, polarizing area of discussion, particularly over the last few years, Raw Story knew they needed to keep commenters in check so they didn’t spread misinformation or go off the rails in their political discourse. At the same time, they still wanted to foster a lively, balanced commenting community—in other words, not an impersonal and sterile forum.

Solution

Raw Story became a Disqus for Business subscriber, allowing them to tailor their integration creatively to suit their website and community. This plan lets Raw Story take full advantage of the platform’s most advanced engagement, moderation, and analytics features, including:

  • Star Ratings: Lets users add a 1-5 star rating and comments.
  • Pre-Moderation: Pre-moderate comments—or commentators—that are spam or trolling based on user reputation. Comments from banned users do not display, while trusted users get automatically approved.
  • Custom Reactions: Custom images for a unique set of reactions.
  • Content Recommendations: Recirculate traffic to pages with Disqus installed that show recent discussions within the same site and with recent activity.
  • Badges: Custom badges to reward and recognize the commenters in your community. You can apply these manually or based on automated presets.
  • Email Subscriptions: Allows users to opt into your newsletter through Disqus.
  • No ads: You can turn off advertising on your site.
  • One-on-one support: Dedicated account management to solve issues and share feedback.  


Raw Story implemented Disqus through a traditional, simple onboarding process. It involved the platform’s business development, account management, customer support, and product and engineer interfaces to ensure a smooth and successful integration customized to the publisher’s specific needs and requirements. Like all Disqus for Business customers, Raw Story has a full-time, direct account manager who provides continuous support and opportunities to optimize their integration.

Results

Implementing the Disqus for Business plan helped Raw Story drive increased interaction among its community via engagements, comments, and reactions. The publisher now averages:

1.5M
Comment views
450k
Comment readers per month
1.3M
Total engagements per month
250k
Comments per month
25k
Reactions per month

As Raw Story gears up for what will undoubtedly be a dynamic 2024 election cycle, they can feel confident that they've voted for the right community engagement partner to help them manage conversations safely and seamlessly. 

"Disqus gives us the ability to easily manage what can be a chaotic environment. The world of commentators are people with thoughts and ideas who want to be heard. Disqus is their podium. Disqus provides an intuitive and engaging user interface along with tools to help community members as well as moderators steer the conversation, and helps filter out the noise. The community aspect is key and relationships are formed that go beyond the forum threads. This leads to a safe commenting environment that makes people feel at home. This has led to an incredibly successful partnership that has helped us take our site to the next level."

- Community Lead at Raw Story and AlterNet