Real-time commenting system Disqus came out this morning with a bunch of numbers, including “10 million” (how many dollars it just secured). The battle for commenting solutions on the Web has clearly not died just because Facebook jumped in the ring.
As a matter of fact, Disqus co-founder and CEO Daniel Ha says the company has grown immensely over recent years and he has the numbers to back it up…Facebook comments, be damned.
Disqus, which this week celebrates four years of existence, raised the $10 million with North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. In its blog post today, the company said that it’s all about the numbers. But what are those numbers?
Disqus says that it reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors per month across the 750,000 websites using its commenting system. Over the last year, that’s an increase of 500%, with much of that growth in recent months. As a matter of fact, the company says it was at only 200 million uniques per month last November, meaning it has more than doubled unique visitors in six months. The post also mentions a recent study by Lijit, which it says that Disqus is used by 75% of websites that use a third-party commenting system.
We asked Ha about how things have gone since Facebook really jumped in the arena and he pointed out (as did we earlier this year) that Facebook comments have actually been around for a while now, yet Disqus is still growing.
“Facebook Comments have been around for almost 2 years and we’ve grown around 600% in the last year. Facebook’s latest update to their widget hasn’t chipped away at our growth, from the metrics we pay attention to. Our daily publisher install rate has grown about 20% since late February when Facebook had their latest announcement. The biggest impact is that Facebook is asked about by tech press and industry peers, but honestly we’ve had great success with media properties and publishers who are switching to Disqus after trying alternatives,” said Ha.
