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Blog Readers and Blog Commentors

• Active Blog Readers : Blog visitors who usually read more than they comment.
• Active Blog Commentors : Blog visitors who usually comment more than they read.

Site visitors who comment and read a lot at the same time usually become either more active commentors or more active readers, since they notice bloggers appreciating their comments more than anything else. Why waste energy doing something on a blog when the blog owner is only looking for more comments, right?

Active commentors are being chosen over active readers

The blogosphere is taking a turn where more and more bloggers are slowly starting to focus on earning money, even if there is no product to sell. Such bloggers are forcing themselves to come up with some kind of a product or writing in order to make money. Top and active commentors on such blogs are usually rewarded, since more comments usually mean more money for blogs. At the same time, top and active readers are unappreciated and left behind on such blogs.

Sure, a blogger cannot communicate via a comment with a reader who does not comment, but are blogs only supposed to interact with those who comment, or are blogs and bloggers supposed to interact with everyone who visits the blog?

Thank you for reading.

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If you have ever commented on The Reasoner, you are automatically entered. I will not make you comment more than usual, and I will not make you run around in circles holding a flame in hand to create special effects in the middle of the night. Now that I think of it, I may give you money if you can create such a special effect at night for me. :p

I will award prizes in a special way. I will choose winners, and ask them what they want. If the prizes you want are part of any of the prizes I offer or something similar, I will give it to you. You can choose one prize, even if it is not listed in the list below.

Prizes I may offer for the RAW

Following are the prizes that I will offer, copied directly from the RAW Prizes page, which Ronald wrote so well. I have edited the list to offer prizes that I can definitely order.

Monetary Prize

These can be offered via Paypal, via gift coupons or via money order in the mail.

• Gone! - Money anywhere from $20 to $100 - Gone! Claimed by Penguins on April 11th, 2007

Non-Monetary Prize Ideas

• Free hosting
• Free advertising space
• Free consulting (blog, design, etc…)
• Reader Spotlight - Write a post about a particular reader
• Create a Readers’ Hall of Fame
• Special invites to non-public betas in the future

Non-Technical Prizes

The following prizes are ideal for readers that are not interested in technical prizes.

• Merchandise (T-Shirts, Mugs, Mouse Pads)
• Retail store gift cards
• Money Orders
• Candles from Little-Light.net
• Transportation tickets, like BART and other tickets (as explained on RA site)

Technical Prizes

The following prize ideas are ideal for readers comfortable with the online world and online shopping.

• iTunes gift certificate
• Amazon.com gift certificate
• Flickr Pro Account
• LiveJournal Paid Account (as suggested by Stacee)
• DeviantART Choice Membership (as suggested by Stacee)
• Yahoo Mail Plus (as suggested by Stacee)
• Paypal Cash
• Design magazines such as HOW and ID (as suggested by inspirationbit)
• Help move someone from a hosted blog account to their own domain.
• Game subscriptions (such as WoW)
• Books from Amazon or BN.com
• Magazine or Newspaper subscriptions for a year

That is it. Please let me know if you want any other prize.

All you have to do to win these prizes is to comment if you have not commented on any part of the site already, and to check your e-mail at least every 24 hours starting from April 8th until April 15th. Every day, early in the morning hopefully, I will announce the prize for the day. All you have to do is to wait for my e-mail announcing that you are the winner. I will also announce the winner in a new post 12 hours into every day of the Reader Appreciation Week, so that you can be sure that if you do not get any e-mail from me for any reason, you can check the post.

How will Bes award the prizes?

Here is a summary of how each day will work:

• Bes will announce a winner. Bes will choose someone randomly. Hitting on Bes might get you more points, and stalking Bes might get you no points. Hmmm, if you are cute and stalking Bes, you might get some points.
• This point was added later, as suggested by Valerie, to be more clear as to how I pick a random commentor. The random number I choose can be anything. Once I have a random number, I will go to the admin area for this site and into the “Stats” area, which lists all the commentors on my site, ever, in a numbered list. I will use the random number to find the winner who is numbered with the same number on that list. I also created a section called “How do I choose a random number?” because of Valerie’s suggestion. Thank you!
• If you are the winner, you will have 24 hours to contact Z and choose one of the prizes. “Who the %^&* is Z?“, you ask. I am Bes Z, so relaaaaax. Prizes only go to people who are relaxed. If you are a person who does not like to relax, I may offer you a massager or something.
• I may announce more than one winner a day, so be prepared.
• If you do not contact me within 24 hours of the winner announcement post, I will have no choice but to sadly find another winner.
• I will keep doing this until all the prizes are gone, or until we hit April 13th, or until I go poor giving away everything from my savings account.
• After all the prizes have been given away, I will realize I should have used all the prizes myself instead. So I will cry. This stage of the process will not be visible to you, fortunately.

That is it. Please let me know if you have any questions. If you have any more suggestions for any prize, please let me know.

How do I choose a random number?

I also talked about this before as a response to Stacee’s comment earlier. There is a list of commentors in my dashboard which lists all the commentors one by one. I will choose a random number out of the blue and pick that commentor as the winner. The random number will sometimes be computer generated, and sometimes be a number I see on a bag of chips. I am trying to be as random as possible. For example, if the random number is 45 and you are listed in that commentor list as being commentor # 45 [which is not related to the number of commentors at all or even who posted first], you will be the winner of the day. If the number is too large, then I will add the numbers to come up with the first set of winner possible.

For example, if the random number is 59640 and I do not have that many commentors [ ], I will add all the numbers: 5 9 6 4 0 and come up with 24, which will make the 24th commentor on the commentor list the winner. How does that sound? I am open to any suggestions if you think something else may be better.

Why am I doing this?

Because I feel like it, and because others like Ronald at RA Project feel like it too. I do not yet earn money from my site, but you read my site regularly, so I want to give something back to you. I do not like being treated like another visitor # 4849328 on sites that claim to love their readers but do not do anything for them. Many blogs claim to love their readers by giving them prizes, but those bloggers also make their readers comment more and work more than normal. I do not like that. I do not like manipulation where only one side benefits and the innocent side does not, whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious.

Thank you for supporting me in different ways. 49% of my site’s success is because of your support. 51% is because of me. Come on! I have to give myself some more points, no? :p

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While everyone will try to appreciate on a regular and constant basis, the Reader Appreciation Week is supposed to send a vibe through the blogosphere to show that we all mean business, by actually giving back to our readers. Please note that even if you are a full time blogger, you are still a reader and thus can win too.

What can you get from me?

The things I will be donating will depend on what people want. All of my readers, both via e-mail and through the online comments are automatically eligible to win prizes. I can offer everything on the RAW Prizes page, except the prizes from the “Non-monetary Prize Ideas” on that page as they need to be discussed with you. If there is something you would like to see, please let me know.

One thing that I like about the Reader Appreciation Week is that the prizes are not limited to certain categories. I will even mail your prize to you if you wish, at no extra cost. However, if you win or want something like an online membership, I am not sure I can mail you anything, since an e-mail would do a better job. If you still let me know your address, I will mail you an appreciation letter.

Please tell me what you would like to get

So please go ahead and start requesting. I am listening. If you want, e-mail me, or contact me via any of the instant messengers. I am always asking you to comment and interact with me more, and you always interact with me also. Please start making requests so I can try my best to do more things for you also. If you want something and I can provide it, I will go ahead and offer it as a prize.

I invite you to please participate in the Reader Appreciation Week in any way you can and in any way you wish. I will really appreciate it.

Thank you for reading.

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How Reader Appreciation Project started

Ronald Huereca originally approached me earlier this year to see if such a project could be started. I was excited over such an opportunity, since I see so many people pretending to appreciate others but in reality they only use others. So the two of us, along with Shawn Blanc, decided to brainstorm together. I would like to present to you the RA Project, which is the result of the brainstorm, and a lot of chicken tenders from Burger King.

Some basic ways Reader Appreciation Project pays you for not doing anything more than what you already do

Please take a look around the site and let me know. This entire project depends on you. Not only that, Ronald has posted a nice post explaining how you can get many prizes from the RA Project. You can win prizes, get money, get coupons and get more things. The best thing about all of this is that you do not have to do anything, since the time you spend reading and commenting on the site already helps us!

You already come to the site and comment, and that is enough. I do not want you to go through extra steps so we can benefit a lot while we give you $10 for your efforts and call it a form of “appreciation.” I want to spread the mentality that the mere fact you read a blog or comment on it means that you have done that blog a huge favor. I want all of us to focus on how to repay that favor.

Thank you for supporting me so far!

You can not only participate by leaving comments on the RA Project site but you can also write posts for the site. Please contact me personally if you are interested.

Thanks for being a good reader of mine all this time. I hope the new project increases awareness that we have to appreciate people not only through words but through actions also.

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It can be hard to figure out how to repay commentors

People get paid everyday to write for both online and offline jobs. People leaving comments on your site are however doing it for free. You should realize that fact since people are writing for free for your site. You should respect your blog commentors in ways other than the usual acknowledgment consisting only of “Thank you!” I think of this almost everyday. “How should I repay this person?” I think if you and I cannot pay our commentors, we should try to appreciate them in other ways.

Leaving comments on your blog is the same as working for you for free

There is a typical stereotype that most bloggers consider to be true: leaving comments on blogs is usually free, so people should not expect something back from the blogger. People work in offices writing different things to make companies money, and in turn those people get paid by those companies. In contrast, your blog readers work for free and do you a favor by leaving you comments. You should return the favor somehow. Comments on your site add value and traffic to your blog. Your blog commentors spend time on your site writing comments that help bring more traffic to your blog and more money to you. Do you not think it is necessary to treat all your blog readers with respect?

Repay your commentors somehow

Your blog readers are volunteers on your site. Commenting is volunteering; otherwise, they can get paid for it in an office or other places. Treat your blog readers by giving them something back too. Writing more and more posts while begging politely for comments and doing nothing else not only makes you look like a person who asks for comments politely but also makes you a person who loves to use blog readers as free labor.

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How people are misunderstanding some of the results

The survey ran from November 20th to December 4th, on around 40-50 English language blogs, and on 12 Spanish language blogs. The number of people responding to each survey question varied. You should realize that just because a survey was done consisting of many blogs does not mean the same rule will apply to you and your blog; that survey helps many blogs, but you have to find out if it helps your blog. It also means that you now have a conflict on your hands, since if you aim to do what the majority of the survey respondents wanted, you will not be pleasing the rest of the blog readers.

Following are some results from the report, and how people are jumping to conclusions based the results:

• 67.3% people surveyed follow links on other blogs in order to find new sites.

  This is an impressive number. 67.3% would be considered the majority in a democratic society. Online, such a survey percentage means that if you link to another blog, most of the people will click that link. I am noticing that many people online are assuming that such a result means having links in posts is guaranteed to work for majority of the readers. My question is simple: How can you assume something to work on the almost billion of online users or even millions of blog readers based on a survey question taken by 214 people? Are you too desperate to hold on to numbers in order to stick with what you stubbornly believe in?

  Also, what about the other 33.7% of the people who do not follow links on blogs? They find blogs through other methods. Should you try to please everyone, or should you only please the majority?

• 43.6% prefer a topical focus.

  It is funny how in other areas of the report, people focus on the majority numbers, whereas in this specific question, many people focused on the 43.6%. A topical focus means a specific topic. That means 43.6% people like to read a blog that has a specific topic that it talks about on a regular basis. While people are jumping and saying “Yes! I always knew having a focused blog was good!“, I would like to remind those people that they also jump for other parts of the survey when majority of the respondents agree to something, but in this case, they are not jumping to the majority 57.4% of the blog readers who read blogs that do not have a topical focus.

  Again, should you apply this very result to your site when it was taken by 263 people? We also do not know about all the topics involved, and we do not know if the topical blog readers were influenced because of finding topics based on language. Can you really go ahead and jump to conclusions based on this? In this case, having a topical blog actually makes you disappoint the majority 57.4%, the majority which you were trying to please in other questions.

• 76.9% of the readers do not post comments on blogs.

  76.9% of the people on the survey, which consisted of 281 people for this specific question, do not like to comment. Does that mean you have to get rid of comments from your blog? How come we all say we value commenting and we say we love pleasing the majority of the people, but we skip this very important result from this survey?

  Again, we should see whether or not the results are affected because of the language, and also because of the time frame when the survey was done, which was for most part a busy holiday season. Also, are the blog readers from the survey the same as the blog readers you have? That is an important question that you need to survey yourself to find out the answer to.

• Spanish speakers read more blogs than English speakers.

  This is also an interesting one that is making many people run around in circles with joy for unknown reasons. According to the survey, there are 2 major results:

  1. 30.8% of the 263 English speaking blog readers read 3-4 blogs regularly.
  2. 43.3% of the 300 Spanish speaking blog readers read more than 10 blogs regularly.

  These two results are making some believe that Spanish blogs are more fun, while some are saying that this means Spanish speaking blog readers are simply hop from one site to another without reading much. My question to such people who are happy with such results is: have you noticed the number of Spanish blogs surveyed compared to the English blogs?

  Comparing 300 people from 12 Spanish blogs with 263 people from more than 40 English speaking blogs is far from a balanced comparison. Such a result means that the 300 Spanish speaking people have more things in common because they hang around those 12 blogs, while the survey for English readers was done on more than 40 blogs meaning there will be more people who will have differences because of the large number of blogs involved for English readers compared to Spanish readers. How can such a result be applied to any blog out of the blue?

I hope the above examples show you that such a survey is extremely important in understanding human behavior on blogs. However, such a survey is also a very bad reason to use when implementing things on our sites or sticking to what we believe unless we know our blog and our blog readers are compatible with the survey. Of course, many blogs love claiming that they have always been right because of the survey results. I would like to claim that generalizing ideas about millions of blog readers who visit millions of blogs based on a study of around 200-300 people visiting a total of around 52-62 blogs is something that people would do in the offline world if they wanted to create stereotypes.

How should we report and react to such surveys then?

I like the way Daniel reported the Blog Readership Report on Daily Blog Tips; he mentioned some of the important facts, and left the analysis of those facts up to you. I think all facts should be mentioned that way without jumping to conclusions, instead of saying things that do not have any ground to stand on.

Learn from the survey and see how it applies to you. Instead of only promoting numbers that you find attractive, understand everything. If you do not read the report yourself and understand it correctly, why would your blog readers read your analysis of the report? Do not rush to conclusions simply because it makes for a good blog post. When studied carefully, the number of people and blogs in the survey shows who can use the information from the survey. It also shows who needs to do their own survey on their own blogs to confirm the existence of specific trends.

This survey gives us an idea of what happens on some blogs. It does not give us proof that the same will happen on our blog. I would recommend doing your own survey or even contacting Vizu to see how they did the survey as they already have experience doing a great job with this report.

If you wish, you can download the Blog Readership Report PDF file, which requires a free PDF viewing software like Foxit PDF Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Both are free to download and use.

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