Disqus, the blog commenting product that appears on sites all over the Internet (including this one), announced that it’s launching programmatic ad buying for its Sponsored Comments product.

Disqus launched Sponsored Comments back in April after testing it for a bit. Here’s what they look like:

Disqus is now working with WPP’s Xaxis to give the latter’s clients the ability to buy and place these ads across the Disqus network, which again, is all over the place on the web.

“A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment,” writes David Fleck on the Disqus blog. “But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds. Since those pilots campaigns, we’ve been working on two key things: targeting and brand safety.”

They’re implementing semantic keyword targeting at the discussion level, and targeting against the topics of articles.

“It’s a new way of thinking about targeting and a more effective one I think,” says Fleck. “It sounds simple, but as an advertiser, you want to reach people that are interested in your product. There’s a difference between your hypothetical target audience and your actual product audience. In other words, the difference between what surveys might tell you versus what actual individual consumers are interested in.”

The targeting capabilities are interesting, but comment sections aren’t exactly known as a great place to find helpful links to click on. Typically if there’s a link trying to sell you something in the comments of a blog post, it’s spam. This is obviously different, but it’s hard to imagine that many Internet users don’t simply tune out links in blog comments unless they’re specifically relevant to the discussion.

Either way, Disqus says it can target over 1,000 topics, and can easily add new ones to meet brand needs and trends.

Image via Disqus