Salon turns off comments and banks on email newsletters to generate identity connections for targeted ads

Why Salon ditched comments

There’s another editorial product that is helping Salon collect email addresses in the hopes of generating more valuable ad impressions: email newsletters.

When people click through to the site from an email newsletter, their hashed email address is passed through to ID vendors, which attempt to match it to the identity of someone advertisers want to reach. Wohl said Salon’s newsletters “have been seeing steady growth.” Over the last six months, after weeding out email subscribers who were not opening or clicking through from its email newsletters, the publisher’s open rate has risen from 16% to 32%, he said. That improved engagement gives the company incentive to invest in additional newsletter titles, such as a new weekly food newsletter, “The Bite,” set to launch the week of Sept. 6, per Wohl.

Over the past decade, several publishers have blamed toxic verbal combat and trolling for decisions to remove comment capabilities from their sites. However, these days, it’s not just trolls whom Salon’s content moderator had to bounce out, said Wohl. “The nature of commenting in the last year-plus has changed,” he said. “There’s disinformation and misinformation and COVID lies and anti-vaxxers and a lot more chatter which is difficult to police and moderate.” Ultimately, he said, those bad actors demanded more energy than the publisher was willing to devote to clean up.

Some publishers may consider ending comments for another reason, said Scott Bender, partner and global head of client strategy at Prohaska Consulting. “It’s a revenue risk,” he said, noting that tough-to-patrol comments sections are a deterrent for more brand-safety-minded advertisers. “If there’s a questionable, inappropriate comment and you’re having a banner ad next to that, it’s an issue,” he said.

Wohl said brand safety risk wasn’t a concern for Salon, which has always been home to strongly opinionated political coverage (the News and Politics homepage on Friday last week featured ads for HBO Max show “The Other Two” and Tanqueray pre-made gin drinks in a can).

There was another reason the publisher ditched comments, though. Salon wanted Williams, who will keep her job, to lend her talents to reporting and producing more content for Salon rather than battling bad information. “We want to create more space for her to pursue that writing passion with Salon,” said Wohl. 

He also stressed that the commenting platform Salon has now turned off, operated by OpenWeb, “works really well.” He added, “The relationship with them was a positive one.”