What is Reader Appreciation? Disclosing monetary interests

Quick: how many professional bloggers do you know who talk openly and usually about how they blog in order to make money, and how they write blog posts to attract readers so they cane make money? One of the common things you see on a lot of self-proclaimed professional blogs is the absence of honest simplicity. One of the reasons for the absence of honesty is the involvement of money. The answer to the above question should tell you the honesty level of the blogs you read regularly.

Like many businesses, many bloggers believe that if they keep talking about helping others while in reality they keep using others to make money, they will make money. This plan works, and it works very well in many cases. The readers, however, usually come out of the situation with nothing at the end. Reader appreciation includes the concept of disclosing the fact of how existence of money can influence ones’ interesting in blogging and the reasons for blogging.

Readers are manipulated when they are told that them, and not money, is the first priority

Many bloggers who want to make money will tell their readers, who are in reality their customers, that the blogger in question wants to help them. That is the only motive expressed on many of such blogs. In both the short and the long run, not disclosing the important monetary interests we may have, and instead giving an illusion that we are doing it all for others, results in readers being manipulated.

Some people think expressing such a thing is the same as the stereotypical suicide and its stereotypical understanding. Show me a blog and with time hopefully I can tell you whether or not the blogger is being completely open about the existence of monetary interests where the reader has more chances of being manipulated or where the reader may already have been manipulated. For some reason, the more a heavily trafficked site is focused on making money, the less it discloses such a fact. The more money one is making from their blog, the more they talk about wanting to help others.

Blogging for reasons other than to help others is not a bad thing. Lying about it in order to make money is a very bad thing.

Many professional bloggers who earn money through their blogs do not blog in order to help others. This is a simple fact which can be accepted publicly, regularly, and as one of the motives behind ones’ blogging. instead of being hidden behind manipulation sentences such as “I like helping people, that is why I blog” or “I do it for the readers” or any other variations of such sentences, one can simply acknowledge the existence of money through reader participation while giving something solid back to the users. There is no real action. There are only words. Even if many people disclose in a sentence or two that they earn money through their blog, they do not give something solid back to the users.

Self-proclaimed professional bloggers who earn blog money and yet hide that fact usually manipulate their readers in a negative manner

Businesses usually do not need to hide the fact that they are making money. Unless one wants to deceive readers into feeling appreciated when in reality they are being manipulated into a false promise of things so that the blogger can earn money directly or indirectly through the blog, most situations call for disclosing even the existence of monetary interests. The biggest tricks many bloggers play on their readers is to make the readers believe that the blogs in questions are not businesses which exist solely to make money.

It is my belief that sites that do not disclose the existence of monetary ties in a blog and how such monetary ties may be affecting the opinions of a person where a person may be doing something, contrary to what they would do when there was no money involved, so that they could benefit financially directly or directly.

Example: RA Project, and personal blogs

Take the example of Reader Appreciation Project. RA Project has so far had no monetary existence of any kind from readers: no paid ads, no paid advertisors, no paid links, no paid pitches, no incoming money whatsoever. The only thing involving money is our own money being pumped into this project because we believe in it, and because we are making money from channels outside of RA Project at the moment. So far, not having any money coming from the site has resulted in the site being more honest and focusing on issues that most rarely ever wanted to think about.

Many personal blogs are like that too, where personal bloggers focus on whatever they want to talk about without thinking of money. But we all know what most of the self-proclaimed “professional” bloggers think of personal blogs, don’t we?

Professional bloggers, or professional manipulators?

Reader appreciation is the disclosure or acknowledgment of the existence of money, and how it may affect us. Such a disclosure and acknowledgment should be public and regular. Self-proclaimed professional bloggers who are too scared to be like Kottke when it comes to monetary disclosures that Kottke made a few years ago are most probably manipulating their readers into false hopes and promises.

As readers, how will we deal with such bloggers? As bloggers, how will we deal with such a trend?