For years, the most valuable audience behavior around your content, discussion, debate, return visits, hasn’t been happening on your site. It’s been happening on Reddit, in Facebook Groups, on Discord. You wrote the story. Someone else got the relationship, the data, and the revenue that came with it.
Today, we’re launching Forums by OpenWeb, part of Community Core, OpenWeb’s integrated system for turning on-site audience participation into loyalty, insights, and revenue. Forums is the piece that completes Community Core, bringing that conversation home.
Why Forums? Why Now?
Publishers are losing audience attention to two forces at once. AI-driven search is increasingly answering questions before a reader ever clicks through to a publisher’s site. And discussion, debate, and return visits, the audience behavior that used to keep readers coming back, has spent years migrating to platforms publishers don’t own. Both point to the same problem: the attention is still out there, it’s just not on the publisher’s own domain anymore.
At the same time, appetite for real conversation is growing. As AI-generated content floods the open internet, readers are gravitating back toward authentic human conversation, and forum-style communities are getting renewed attention. Publishers want to capture that on their own terms, not rent it from someone else’s platform. That’s the moment Forums is built for.
Meet Community Core
Community Core by OpenWeb is the community engine that enables publishers to turn audience participation into long-term strategic business value. It connects conversation, forums, moderation, and monetization into one environment, living directly on the publisher’s own domain instead of scattered across a patchwork of commenting tools, moderation vendors, and engagement add-ons.
In short: community, as a system.
“Most engagement tools solve one problem at a time. That approach has a ceiling. Community Core is us building past it,” says Jim Daily, CEO of OpenWeb. “It’s the infrastructure layer underneath everything we ship going forward. Every product that follows will build on the ones before it, not just add another tool to the pile.”
Forums, Explained
Forums by OpenWeb is a publisher-owned community product, and the piece that completes Community Core. It’s moderated by default through Aida, OpenWeb’s AI state-of-the-art moderation engine, already trusted across thousands of premium publisher properties, and aligned to each publisher’s own editorial taxonomy, so conversations stay on-brand and audience data stays inside the publisher’s environment instead of leaking out to a third-party platform.
Forums is also built to be found. That comes down to two things:
- Evergreen search value: structured, dynamic threads create long-tail, crawlable content that gets continuously indexed by search engines.
- AI engine readiness: that same structure is designed to make community discussions easy for AI platforms to parse and read as generative search grows.
And Forums is monetizable from day one. Because it’s part of Community Core, engagement, moderation, and monetization work as one system instead of three separate tools stitched together.
What Did Forums Deliver in Beta?
OpenWeb currently powers communities across thousands of premium publisher properties globally, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Forums has already been in closed beta with partners including Weather.com, 9to5Mac, and Footballco.
During a closed beta, Forums delivered measurable gains, based on internal data across select partners:
- Up to 3x increase in time on site, driven by deep, continuous participation in structured discussions
- Up to 2x+ increase in registered users, as passive readers convert into authenticated members to join the conversation
- Up to 21%+ increase in overall engagement, from hosting community conversations directly on-site instead of ceding them elsewhere
“At FootballCo, everything we do is about fueling football culture and connecting with fans long after the 90 minutes of the game are up. Giving our audience a place to actually debate, celebrate, and connect is massive. By using OpenWeb to power our forums, we are hosting those discussions right on our own site,” says Juan Delgado, CEO of FootballCo.
“Our readers are incredibly passionate tech enthusiasts who love to discuss every detail of a new release, but those deep conversations often moved to external platforms. By working with OpenWeb to launch our new forums, we are keeping that engagement right on 9to5Mac. It gives our community a safe, high-quality space to connect around shared interests, and it helps us build deeper, direct relationships with our audience,” said Bradley Chambers at 9to5Mac.
What Does This Mean for Publishers Going Forward?
Community Core isn’t a one-time rebrand attached to a single launch. Community Core is the frame for every OpenWeb product built next: conversation, forums, moderation, and monetization, unified instead of fragmented, so that participation converts into revenue without ever leaving the publisher’s own environment. Forums is the first product to fully live inside Community Core. It won’t be the last.
Own your community. Keep your audience. Monetize engagement.
Key Points
- Forums completes Community Core: Forums by OpenWeb is the product that completes Community Core, OpenWeb’s integrated system unifying conversation, forums, moderation, and monetization on the publisher’s own domain.
- Publisher-owned, moderated by Aida: Forums keeps engagement, data, and editorial control inside the publisher’s own environment, moderated by default through Aida, OpenWeb’s AI moderation engine, already trusted across thousands of premium publisher properties.
- Built for the AI-search era: Forums produces structured, dynamic threads with evergreen search value and AI engine readiness, designed to stay indexable by search engines and readable by AI platforms as generative search grows.
- Proven in beta: During a closed beta with premium publishing partners, Forums delivered up to a 3x increase in time on site, up to 2x+ growth in registered users, and up to a 21%+ increase in engagement, based on internal data across select partners.
- Backed by premium publishers: OpenWeb powers communities across thousands of premium publisher properties globally, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal, with Forums already in closed beta with Weather.com, 9to5Mac, and Footballco.
- The bigger picture: Community Core is the new name for OpenWeb’s integrated platform, and the frame for every OpenWeb product going forward.
