I recently flew with American Airlines and had several bad experiences. Ronald pointed out to me that because I had paid for American Airlines tickets, American Airlines could basically treat me in any manner on the day of my flight, short of beating me up, and still get away with it. I could not tell American Airlines “Because of your service I am not flying with you, and am going to cancel my flight with you that is in 30 minutes and switch to another airline!” I was stuck.

Such a thing is happening on the blogosphere also: bloggers are luring in readers to blogs, and then those same bloggers are not giving readers anything more than what the readers were getting before becoming loyal readers of that blog. In this article, by new reader I am referring to people coming to a site for the first time or rarely, and by confirmed or current reader, I am referring to people coming to a site regularly or subscribing to the RSS feeds of that site.

What do many airline companies, banks, and blogs have in common?

Like dozens of companies the airline industry, many other businesses treat new customers better than existing customers, an increasing number of blogs are treating blog readers depending on their loyalty level. If a reader is not yet a loyal blog reader, the blogger will respect and communicate with that reader a lot, offering incentives in return for that readers’ continued and confirmed visits in the future. For such bloggers, once there is a confirmed reader, it is time to move on and appeal to a new reader instead of satisfying and giving back more to the current reader.

Promising readers gold for their RSS subscriptions

There are RSS buttons all over blogs, asking readers to subscribe to RSS feeds. But when a reader subscribes, the reader only gets the information they were already getting, and less attention. “Subscribe” to this, reply to that, post for this, read for that. Everyone is calling for an action, and once that action is done and the blogger benefits, nothing usually comes back to the reader other than silence or a usual, automated form of “thank you for your comment.”

Current readers get no benefit for being active readers

Why are there no new incentives for current readers, instead of new readers? Why are there no giveaways and contests where a current reader does not have to do anything more for the blogger? Many other contests out there exist in order to bring in more traffic and comments to the blog and more money to the blogger, instead of existing only to benefit the current and existing active readers. Current readers get no extra benefit compared to when they were new readers, and on top of that, they get even less attention, communication and respect than before.

There are no managers to complain to in the blogosphere. You don’t like a blog? You will most probably be told to not visit that blog anymore. Of course, all of your energy, time and clicks spent promoting that blog directly or indirectly will be ignored, and you will not be rewarded. The blogosphere can be a very cold place, and yet such a fact is not disclosed when readers are invited to RSS subscriptions, to comments, to posts and to more visits. Everything is warm as long as you are a new reader. Once you are a confirmed reader, you become just another reader “out there.” You get a lot of messages to do things when you are a new reader. You get no attention and no appreciation whatsoever on many blogs once you become a confirmed reader.

Are many bloggers focusing only on turning new readers into current readers?

There are no more invitations for an existing reader for anything new. If there are any contests, the existing reader has to compete with all other readers through gimmicks like more comments, posts, and other things which benefit only the blogger and one reader in the end, while all the other readers waste time and do not get anything in return.

The current reader does not get proper attention, does not get honest and real responses to e-mails, does not get good comment feedback, does not feel appreciation from the blogger and does not get anything more than a vague thank you note that a blogger addresses to all the readers, which many bloggers do in order to simply fulfill an obligation and show an illusion of appreciation. On top of that, the reader keeps spending time in trying to communicate with the blogger through rss subscription, comments, e-mails and posts linking to the blog in question, while the blogger in question does mainly only one thing: write things to lure in more readers.

Where is the appreciation in that?

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