JS-Kit buys Haloscan, bashes Disqus

July 8, 2008 | Dan Kaplan | Comments |

JS-Kit, best known for its easy-to-add commenting widget, has acquired Haloscan, another comment service, for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock. The acquisition adds 500,000 blogs to JS-Kit’s reach and makes it larger than the rest of the market, which includes Disqus, SezWho, and Intense Debate, combined.

The company made the acquisition in January and will now begin marketing the rest of its widgets, which include a ratings widget similar to the one below this post, to Haloscan’s existing base. It claims that its widgets, which are used by Sun Microsystems and JetBlue, now have over 19 million users and over 100 million page views a month. It’s not clear, however, how many of these users are active commenters. JS-Kit makes money by placing ads into a stream of comments and shares the revenue 50/50 with the content producer.

In conjunction with this news, JS-Kit has added a “portable profile” feature that strongly resembles the one offered by Disqus. This profile contains all of the posts a commenter has made across any of the sites in JS-Kit’s ecosystem. Despite the fact that this feature is clearly inspired by Disqus (which VentureBeat uses), JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, does not hesitate to bash his much-buzzed-about competitor, which he alleges “steals traffic from bloggers” and “is not upfront about its plans to monetize at the expense of its users.”



His critiques focus on the fact that Disqus hosts comments on its own servers and site and in so doing, takes away all the benefits that comments could have on a blog’s search engine ranking. Asked to respond to these criticisms, Disqus founder, Daniel Ha (no relation to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha), points out that his service offers a plug-in that makes it relatively simple to get search engines to index the comments on your blog, itself. Ha also argues that since JS-Kit puts ads in its users’ comments, its monetization plan interferes with the user experience.

See Allen Stern’s post on CenterNetworks for more on the ups and downs of Disqus.

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • I can certainly vouch for the Disqus plugin for Wordpress. As long as you are using their API based plugins you can easily test that you aren't having your "traffic stolen" with a little Google searching. (here's my experiment: http://knightknetwork.com/2008/06/11/disqus-seo...) Catty comments aside this is a strong move, userbase is an important selling point and not one that matched with feature duplication.
  • KnightKnetwork, i've just voted this comment up one Disqus point. Now if only we had full comment-plugin data portability, that point could be carried over to JS-Kit profiles.
  • This is bad. But DISQUS will surely prevail.
  • MoneyDoesntTalk
    Khris is going to swallow his own tongue when he finds out how many of those Haloscan users are still using it.

    Simply buying users doesn't ensure success, Khris.

    Here is to those who innovate! ID and Disqus!
  • khrisloux
    Hi Dan,

    Thank you for the effort you put into talking to me and
    writing about our news.

    Be Well,

    Khris Loux, CEO JS-Kit

    khris at js-kit.com
  • looks like this could be a hit or miss for js-kit.
    whether the userbase is very active or not, could make a huge difference into how successful the purchase is.

    nothing wrong with bashing your competiton as long as you can back it up with some proof yourself, or even better, a product that is better than their competition.

    although.
    i think i'm going to have to side with disqus on the point of having their comments on their own server and whatnot. if someone is going to be running adsense or something and is trying to get certain ads, by having too many comments shown on that one page can mess up the keyword that it is going to trigger.

    regardless though,
    best of luck to js-kit in expanding.
  • Talk about Hostile Takeovers!
  • Thanks .

    Great post . Disqus rocks .
  • i read this blog, nice outline
  • After trying both Disqus and Intensedebate, I had to switch to JS-Kit. The pleasant surprise feature in JS-Kit was that the comments are synchronised with the blogger commenting system. So if I decide to uninstall JS-Kit, my comments will be intact in blogger. It has facebook connect like Disqus and that is a great plus point.
  • Florida Expungement. Disqus owns.
  • yes i'm agree, simply buying users doesn't ensure success.
  • Disqus are broaded.. It is good to us..
  • I loved Disqus.. Coz it is more easy and more user friendly..
  • Disqus, in my opinion is the future of commenting.
  • I still prefer Disqus other than other commenting platform and despite this take over, I think Disqus won't feel a thing. I usually use this on my blogspot blogs.