Disqus, a popular commenting platform, recently launched sponsored comments across its vast reach of over 3 million Disqus-powered websites around the world. As an increasing number of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn introduce sponsored content, will these ads interrupt our “disqussions,” or will they be non-intrusive and relevant enough to not bother us?

From my experience as a user and a marketer on Facebook and Twitter, the placement of the Disqus sponsored comments seem to be relatively non-invasive yet exist in the prime location between the article or blog post and the discussion below.

Here, I’ll review Disqus’ plans for sponsored comments and Facebook and Twitter’s history with native advertising, and provide some best practices for Disqus as it enters this new advertising market.

What advertisers will get through Disqus’ sponsored comments

As anyone who has spent time browsing comment sections of websites or blogs knows all too well, these “comment arenas” can often denigrate into heated and crude debates that few brands would want to be associated with. To combat this, and ensure brand safety, Disqus will continuously scan comments to ensure that the placement of the sponsored comment is suitable.

Advertisers on Disqus will be able to target their specific niche using 1,000 different topics. These ads will be placed just above the comments on the blog or website and when users click to reply or expand the comments, they will be redirected to the paid destination. This proven hotspot between the content and comments on many sites and blogs is usually where the paid redirect links of Taboola or Outbrain currently reside.

Photo Credit: PR screen shot

Looking at other social networks

Disqus joins the ranks of LinkedIn, Twitter and, most notably, Facebook in mixing up promoted posts with organic content. With a growing number of pageviews for most social sites coming from mobile and social networks, web communities and popular blogs are finding the need to adapt from their big, and rich in ad real estate, websites to a much smaller screen. For this, promoted content mixed in with user generated content (UGC) seems to be the prefered, or at least disruptive, method of choice.

Twitter’s promoted tweets, which went live to the public in April 2010, do not take away too much from the user experience, yet often feel slightly different from organic tweets due to their “polished” copy, glossy pictures and lack of abbreviations or spelling mistakes.

On Facebook for desktop, with the constantly evolving advertising structures, the line between page posts, sponsored posts, promoted posts and news articles is becoming increasingly blurred. On mobile, the Facebook sponsored ads, suggested apps and promoted posts seem to be a bit heavy and increasingly omnipresent, but bearable.

Final thoughts

From the perspective of a marketer, Disqus ads will provide a rich new advertising space that could prove to be precise, timely and relevant for hot topics and current events. Disqus powered blogs and web communities receive 15 billion page views and 1.6 billion unique visitors each month.

At the end of the day, my biggest concern when it comes to ad placements is relevance and timeliness. For the marketer, achieving both of these is crucial to get a high click-through rate (CTR) and, most importantly, high conversions. As a social media user, relevance is always important. If the ad I am seeing on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook is highly relevant, I will probably just click it without doing the mental math of whether it is organic or paid. I’m usually only bothered by ads when they are irrelevant.

I believe Disqus will excel in the ad space and deliver appropriate ads showing what the readers and commenters want and, using the social pulse of which Disqus conversations are “hot,” deliver these ads when they are the most relevant.