How Much Does Comment Moderation Cost?

The arithmetic is not the difficult part. The difficult part is that every input has an instinct pulling it downward, and you have to catch yourself.

1. 1Count the comments on a normal dayCount what a real day looks like, not your quietest one. If you run ads, count a day you were spending, because that is the day the comments arrive. Multiply by 30.44, the average length of a month, for comments a month on that page.
2. 2Multiply by every page you runTen clients is ten comment sections. Agencies get their surprise here, because the work does not get faster because you did the last one five minutes ago.
3. 3Be honest about the minutesReading a comment is quick. Deciding what it is, checking whether the account is real, hiding it, and finding your way back into what you were doing is not. Two minutes is fair for anything that needs a decision, and most of it does.
4. 4Use the real hourly rateIf you pay somebody, use what they cost you rather than what lands in their bank. If you do it yourself, use what an hour of your time is worth. If you would rather not price your own hour, put zero and read the hours instead.
5. 5Add the hours nobody is awake forLook at when your comments land. If your ads run at 2am and across time zones, some share of your comment section arrives into an empty room. Those hours cost nothing here, which is exactly what is wrong with this sum.
6. 6Multiply by 12 and sit with itEveryone shrugs at the monthly figure. The yearly one ends the conversation, because it stops looking like a nuisance and looks like a salary.

The sum above prices your time. It is not the whole bill, and the rest is the part we will not pretend to measure. What follows is a list of real costs with no multiplier attached, because anyone who hands you a multiplier for these made it up.

1. 1The sale that went to the scam replyYou paid for the impression. Somebody arrived, read the top comment, found a scam reply wearing your support team's name, and left. That is money you already spent, converting for somebody else.
2. 2The buyer who quietly wentNo notification, no reply, no complaint. They read the top comment, believed it, and scrolled. You cannot count someone who silently left, so nobody can honestly tell you what this costs. It is still the biggest number on this page.
3. 3The question you never got toPrice, sizing, shipping. Those comments turn into orders, and they are the ones buried while you are busy hiding crypto bait. That is a lost order, not a lost hour.
4. 4Getting your attention backTwenty comments do not cost twenty times one comment. Each one pulls you out of what you were doing, and the way back in is not free. This is why honest minutes beat stopwatch minutes.

Once you have a number there are three things you can do, and that is the whole list. Here is each one honestly, including the one we do not sell.

1. 1Do it yourselfFree in money, and the right answer at low volume. If you get a handful of comments a day and you are on your phone anyway, a calculator that tells you to buy something has an agenda. Turn on Meta's free filters and get on with your day.
2. 2Hire someone, which is sometimes rightThis is the correct answer when the job is judgement rather than a first pass. If your comments are mostly real customers with real complaints, if a wrong call costs you more than a wrong comment, or if community is your actual product, hire the person. Nothing replaces somebody who knows your customers.
3. 3Know what hiring really costsThe salary is the easy half. It is also recruiting, a notice period, training, and the fact that this is the job people leave, so the gap you close this quarter is a gap again next year. And one person is 40 hours of a 168 hour week.
4. 4Automate the first passMost of what anybody reads needs no judgement at all. It is crypto bait, contact spam, and the same seven words of abuse, obvious in under a second. That first pass is the part that does not need a human, and it is most of the hours.

The number that surprises people is not the cost

People expect the money to sting. It usually does not, much. What stops the room is the other arithmetic, the one about hours.

• A week is 168 hours and a person covers 40

  Comments arrive in all 168. Ads run at 2am, and in time zones where 2am is the middle of the afternoon. Covering every hour a comment can appear takes 4.2 full time people, before anyone takes a holiday or has a bad hour at hour seven.

• Nobody is buying 4.2 people to watch a comment section

  Say it out loud and it answers itself. That budget has never been approved for this, so everybody who says they watch their comments around the clock is describing an intention, not a rota.

• Your cost figure assumed somebody was there

  Method 1 priced the comments you handled while you were awake. It has no column for the hours nobody staffed, so the cheaper your number looks, the more of your week is uncovered.

• Nobody moderates comments full time anyway

  The person on it also posts, reports, and sits in meetings. If comments are 40 percent of their week, one full time person gives you 16 hours of coverage, not 40. This is the input that quietly breaks most rotas.

So the question was never what moderation costs. It is what covering 168 hours costs, and the honest answer is that nobody staffs it, which is why the hours you cannot afford are the ones worth automating.

When your number looks wrong

• Why is my number higher than I expected?

  Usually one of two inputs. Either you counted a real day with ads running rather than the quiet day you had in mind, or you used honest minutes rather than stopwatch minutes. Both are correct. The other candidate is pages: ten comment sections is ten comment sections, and that total is supposed to be uncomfortable.

• Why is my number lower than it feels?

  Because the sum only prices the hours you spent. It has no line for the hours nobody covered, the buyer who read the top comment and left, or the question that got buried. A small figure often means most of your week is uncovered rather than cheap.

• Why does the cost come out at zero?

  Because you put your own rate at zero, which is fair if you would rather not price your own hour. Read the hours instead. The money genuinely is zero and the hours genuinely are not. Time spent hiding crypto comments is time not spent on the product, the ads, or the customers.

• Why does my figure change every time I do it?

  Comment volume moves with ad spend, so a figure from a week you were not spending is not your figure. Do it for a normal spending week and treat that as the baseline. If your spend doubles, so does the top line of the sum.