Publishers killed the comment section. FOCUS online is rebuilding it as a product.
Germany’s FOCUS online and community platform Ferret Go are treating reader engagement as a product challenge rather than a moderation one
Comments didn’t die; the economics of running them did.
Publishers didn’t close their comment sections because readers stopped wanting them. They closed them because the maths didn’t work: moderation was expensive, the reputational risk was real, and nobody could demonstrate a return. Community sat on the books as a cost, tolerated rather than managed, and eventually switched off.
Kevin Kallenbach has spent twenty years watching that calculation from the inside, in ad sales at Madsack and the Bild Group, then in digital at publishing software company Sprylab Technologies, and now as CEO of Ferret Go, the Berlin-based company whose Conversario platform processes over 30 million dialogue events a month for clients including FAZ, RTL, Der Spiegel and Greenpeace. His read on why publishers got community wrong is characteristically commercial: it was never a technology problem; it was an economic one. The technology to moderate at scale exists. What most publishers lacked was a viable model for what the community was supposed to do for the business once the moderation was handled.
The make-or-buy decision at FOCUS online
FOCUS online is Germany’s largest digital news portal, operated by BurdaForward, part of the Hubert Burda Media Group. At that scale, the question was never whether to moderate. It was a question of whether to build or buy.
Danny von Holdt, Executive Director Product for the FOCUS online App and Web, describes it as a straightforward calculation. Moderating a community of FOCUS online’s size with internal resources wasn’t realistic. A specialist tool would deliver higher quality and faster product development than anything built in-house, and engineering capacity was better spent on areas where the publication differentiates. Ferret Go was the first provider they partnered with; before it, there was no dedicated tool in place at all.
Three things made it the choice: genuine German-language linguistic capability; a publisher track record, WELT, Bild, FAZ, ntv, that gave confidence at volume; and a multi-channel architecture that brought on-site, social, and emerging platform moderation into a single console rather than a patchwork of point solutions.
What AI still gets wrong
Conversario’s AI handles volume; it doesn’t handle ambiguity. Kallenbach is direct about the limits: the system is strong on high-volume, clear-cut cases, and weak on context: irony, coded language, community norms that shift quickly, political or socially sensitive content that doesn’t resolve neatly into permitted or prohibited. That limitation matters most where the reputational stakes for a publisher are highest.
FOCUS online has kept human oversight in the loop throughout. The AI filters the clear-cut cases, which is where the real efficiency gain lies. Human moderators handle the ones where editorial judgement is required, and the division between the two is deliberate.
Moderation and engagement are different products
Ferret Go runs two products that solve different problems. Conversario handles moderation, which is risk control at scale. Engagently, developed later, addresses a separate challenge: actively driving audience interaction and growth. Kallenbach built them separately because the underlying logics are different: different teams, different KPIs, different product thinking. Publishers who conflate the two tend to underinvest in both.
The two are now converging into a more integrated community platform. At FOCUS online, the impact of treating them as distinct has already changed how the organisation operates.
“The community stopped being treated as a moderation cost centre and became a product surface. Editorial now considers which articles drive high-quality discussion, not just reach. Product sees the comment layer as a meaningful engagement and registration driver.”
Danny von Holdt, Executive Director Product, FOCUS online App & Web, BurdaForward
Die Debatte: debate as an editorial format
The most concrete expression of that shift at FOCUS online is Die Debatte, a dedicated editorial section where reader opinions on specific topics get their own space, separate from article comment threads. The format treats the community’s range of voices as editorial content in its own right rather than a byproduct of journalism.
Engaged commenters spend more time on the site and return more frequently than passive readers. Comment interaction is one of FOCUS online’s strongest predictors of registration, which, as third-party signals erode, matters considerably. A comment is a declared interest, which is a stronger signal than a pageview, and when it is paired with a logged-in user, it becomes a data point publishers can use for personalisation, subscription offers and editorial planning.
Beyond FOCUS online’s existing “Die Debatte” format, Ferret Go has also developed a dedicated debate feature within Engagently. Readers can first vote on a specific question or proposition, then explain their position in the structured discussion below.
The format lowers the barrier to participation while encouraging users to contribute their own arguments rather than simply reacting to an article. For publishers, it has proven particularly effective as a driver of registration, as taking a position often motivates users to create an account and join the conversation.
Together with FOCUS online, Ferret Go is currently exploring a new debate format that goes beyond traditional article-centred discussions by creating dedicated spaces for audience participation on broader topics and questions.
DSA: compliance as a byproduct
The EU’s Digital Services Act has made moderation obligations more explicit and elevated the topic within publishers’ legal and board conversations. For Ferret Go, that has meant higher visibility but also more complexity. The company is DSA-ready; Kallenbach’s framing, however, is infrastructure rather than compliance. Publishers building moderation primarily to satisfy regulatory requirements are, in his view, thinking about it the wrong way; they will find that regulatory pressure compounds quickly if the underlying system isn’t built to scale, regardless.
An engagement toolkit beyond the comment box
Engagently is broader than its origins in the comment layer. Alongside moderated commentary, it runs debates, a format where registered users argue a question directly with each other; live chats, hosted around breaking news or scheduled editorial moments; and quizzes, which sit on top of stories as a participation format rather than a quiz product in their own right. The logic is the same in each case. A registered reader who has something to do on the page stays longer, gives the publisher more to work with, and is more likely to convert when a subscription offer eventually arrives.
Ferret Go’s client base is concentrated in DACH, where its German-language capabilities and existing publisher relationships provide structural depth. The UK is next, approached selectively: a small number of publishers first, to build reference cases before scaling the pitch. The underlying problems are the same as in Germany.
Data sovereignty, namely EU servers, GDPR compliance, and publisher ownership of their own data, lands differently by market. In DACH, it is often a decisive factor for larger publishers. In the UK, functionality and time-to-value dominate the opening conversation. Kallenbach expects that to shift as first-party data strategy moves from aspiration to operational priority.
Three years from now
Kallenbach’s view of where the market goes is direct.
“Moderation will become reliable infrastructure, something that has to work, but becomes less of a bottleneck over time. The real competition will shift to how well publishers build community as a product: not just allowing interaction, but actively shaping it to drive retention, registration, and loyalty.”
Kevin Kallenbach, CEO, Ferret Go
Von Holdt’s FOCUS online roadmap points in the same direction. Die Debatte will expand, and the debate itself will become a defining part of the editorial experience, a format rather than a feature beneath an article. Engagently’s other surfaces, live chats, quizzes, and the wider participation toolkit will sit alongside it. For both Ferret Go and FOCUS online, the bet is that a decade after publishers walked away from community, the work of rebuilding it is just beginning.
