Blog Comments Revisited: Why Major Bloggers Are Turning Comments Back On

Do you have comments enabled on your blog?

Have you ever turned them off?

To discover why big bloggers turned their comment systems back on, I interview Michael Hyatt and Brian Clark.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Michael Hyatt and Brian Clark. Michael is author of Platform and co-author of the new book, Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want. He's also an avid blogger at MichaelHyatt.com and host of the This Is Your Life podcast. Brian is CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger, host of the Unemployable podcast, and evangelist for the Rainmaker Platform.

Back in May 2014, I had Mark Schaefer and Tim McDonald (who was with Huffington Post) on the show to talk about the trend of big blogs shutting down their comments. This was spurred by a controversial post from Copyblogger entitled, "Why We’re Removing Comments on Copyblogger" from March 2014. In January 2015, Michael Hyatt published, "I’ve Pulled Comments from My Blog-Here’s Why."

Michael and Brian will explore why the initial decision to remove comments was made and why those comments are now back.

You'll also discover tips for how to grow your email list.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Blog Comments Revisited
Why Brian shut down comments

Brian starts by saying he is not the one who made the decision to shut down or bring back blog comments. He left that up to his editorial team.

On Copyblogger, a lot of the article feedback shifted to social media, while the product development feedback had moved over to their customer base. As you mature as a company, you really start listening to your existing customers, as opposed to those "out in the wild," Brian explains. At the time, they had 150,000 customers and their strategy was to pay more attention to them.

Part of the decision to remove comments (not discussed in the post by Sonia Simone, who ultimately made the decision with input from the editorial team) was a situation Brian calls the six-month class of current commenters.

When you publish a marketing blog, other marketers use commenting as a traffic strategy. You'd have six months of the same people showing up, leaving comments: some stupid, some thoughtful. Then they'd move on and a new group of people would come into the comments.

The practical reasons for removing comments were the shift to social and to eliminate spam. It's a big deal to moderate comments and have the editorial team spend a significant amount of time trying to figure out whether something is spam or legitimate.

Copyblogger's experiment to remove comments lasted for over a year.

Listen to the show to learn why Brian left comments on their podcast network, Rainmaker.fm.

Why Michael shut down comments

Michael says his reasons for shutting down comments on his blog were similar to Brian's. Additionally, Michael noticed the number of comments per post had been going down for some time, so he decided to do a little research.

He discovered that in 2011, he averaged about 195 comments per blog post. Then in 2012, while his traffic went up, his comments dropped to an average of 179. Traffic went up again in 2013, and the average number of comments went down to 114. In 2014 blog traffic was up 74% over the previous year, but the average number of comments had dropped down to about 62 per post.

Michael adds he read Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism, and thought he had to pare stuff back.

The final straw for Michael, who was and is using Disqus as his commenting platform,