A couple of weeks ago we released Audience Analytics to help remove some of the mystery around the people who engage on your website.

At Disqus, we love to stay up to date with the latest news, events, and trends in the world of digital publishing. It helps us to understand the challenges that today’s publisher face and better support them with new tools and strategies. Team members across sales, customer success, product, marketing, and engineering regularly share their favorite stories. We even have an internal slack channel devoted to sharing the latest, most relevant, and most interesting articles that are impacting the digital publishing industry.

You don't have to go very far on most publisher sites these days before you're asked to subscribe to an email newsletter. Maybe you've noticed this already while reading your favorite food blog or catching up on the top stories from a local news site. You can even find an example right here on the Disqus Blog. Just scroll to the end of any article and you'll see a prompt appear inviting you to subscribe to our newsletter (please do if you like).

Developing effective strategies for increasing reader engagement shouldn’t feel like guesswork. If you don’t know who your most avid readers are, the impact of your engagement efforts, or understand how your community is growing over time, that ends today.

It’s here! 🎉 After months in beta testing, the Disqus for WordPress 3 plugin is now available to download in the WordPress Plugin repository.

Version 3.0 introduces several notable improvements including an overhaul to Commenting Syncing, a new Automatic Installation feature, and a redesigned plugin settings page. In addition, we completely rewrote the plugin to utilize the latest WordPress APIs so that we can deliver you more frequent updates and new features in the future.

Disqus is designed to help publishers build on-site engagement and retain loyal audiences. We know firsthand from our conversations with you that a lot of hard work goes into this process. That’s why our Publisher Success team is constantly thinking about how we can make your life easier as a publisher. A big part of our strategy is to arm you with information about our product the moment you need it most.

Recently, we released a new Email Subscription feature to help publishers grow their email lists. Many of you requested a way to automatically import new subscribers into your email marketing provider. Today, we’re excited to announce an update to our Zapier integration to automate this task and help you get more done with Disqus.

Zapier allows you to easily create workflows to connect all your favorite apps (over 1,000 to be exact) to do just about anything. Best of all, Zapier requires zero technical knowledge to get up-and-running.

More than ever, we see publishers investing in building direct connections with their readers to cultivate stronger relationships. With the threat of Facebook’s pivot away from publishers, publishers are increasing their investment in on-site engagement, email newsletters, and subscriptions where they own the relationship with their readers.

Last Thursday Facebook shook up the publishing world when it announced plans to make the largest change in years to their News Feed. Going forward Facebook will prioritize content that users share over all other content. This means that, as early as this week, users will start to see less publisher content and more content from their friends and families.

To kick off the new year, Disqus hosted a hackathon recently where teams worked on various projects to explore new ideas, solve interesting problems, and build something cool. At the end of the week, teams demoed their projects to the company who voted for their favorites.

Here are four of the most interesting projects that came out of the hackathon. Let us know what you think in the comments below! If you missed the recap of our last HackWeek, visit this blog post here to learn more.