Bassey Etim, Community Desk Editor at the New York Times, talks about how they've built a profitable comments section and what the future of comments and community holds.

1. Building the Community
People Want
Bassey Etim
Community Desk Editor, New York Times
@basseye
#cmxsummit

2. How The Times Moderates
The Team: 14 moderators. 4 Developers.
Our Style: Comments are manually reviewed by a team
of journalists before they are published. We moderate
11,000 comments per day.
Scale: We allow comments on less than 1/10th of our
assets.
@BasseyE

3. Why all the trouble?
Good Habits: A large percentage of our subscribers use
comments each month.
Good business: Users who post comments are orders
of magnitude more likely to purchase subscriptions.
Great reason to join: Comments are one of precious
few reasons new arrivals have to register without
subscribing.
@BasseyE

4. The Comments We Want
Articulate, well-informed remarks that are
relevant to the article.
We welcome criticism and advice and do not
tolerate personal attacks or incoherence.
@BasseyE

5. What We Feature - NYT Picks
● High Quality
● Broad Representation
● Back and Forth Conversation
● Personal Stories
● The Unexpected (humor, for example!)
@BasseyE

6. The Next Generation
Loves the quality: Every age demographic surveyed
says that times comments are best characterized as
higher quality/less angry.
When they don’t read: Young people say it’s largely
because they “only care what the reporter has to say.”
Want a simple experience: Do not find online
annotation a particularly appealing prospect.
@BasseyE

7. Young readers are
The only demographic group to say they
read comments to help me compare my
opinions with others rather than to add
value to the story.
@BasseyE

8. Young readers post comments
to express themselves rather
than contribute to a topic.
@BasseyE

9. How do we build communities
to scale if readers are moving
toward self interest and away
from serving their peers?
@BasseyE

10. Our Opportunity
Online comments are a limited product.
We can use our community desk to re-imagine
the comments section and create unique
experiences that every reader will love.
@BasseyE