Experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger

Back in April last year I was contacted by Bo McGath, an Honours student in Communication and Cultural Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Bo was researching the experiences that blog readers have with their favorite blogger for her Honours Thesis and asked if I’d be willing to assist by providing some information and feedback based on my blogging knowledge and experience.

Being the search geek that I am, I was delighted to help.

When talking with Bo (via email) she pointed-out that there has always been an ‘unofficial’ assumption, backed-up by a lot of the literature on blogging, that blog readers are bloggers and vice versa.

So instead of focusing on this, she was going to take a slightly different approach – conducting research into the kinds of relationships that are developed when the readers of blogs do not maintain a blog themselves and do not know their blogger of choice offline.

With that in mind, what kinds of personal investments do these readers have with their favourite blog/blogger.

There were some rather interesting findings, outlined in the thesis abstract below:

As a relatively new type of communicative medium, blogs have become a popular platform for a diverse range of people and purposes. Although much research has been conducted on the practice of blogging from the blogger’s perspective and the impact that blogging has had upon mainstream media, there has been a comparatively smaller interest in blog readers.

The research that has focused on the blog reader has undertaken a general inquiry into why readers read particular blogs. With the hope of adding to this body of knowledge, this research sets out to explore the relationship between blog readers and their blogger of choice and the extent to which parasocial theory can be applied in the interpretation of such a relationship.

In order to carry out such research aims, I conducted an open-ended, email-based qualitative survey that explored the key themes of history and regularity of use, perceptions of reader-blogger relationships, attraction, identification and modes of interaction. Survey responses were then coded and thematically categorised, using words, phrases and whole sentences as the unit of analysis.

The findings suggest that the way blog readers approach and perceive particular bloggers is largely determined by the type of blog that is published. This was most apparent when comparing how readers of science and political blogs make connections with the blogger to how readers of personal blogs approach the blogger.

Therefore, I propose that parasocial theory is most useful when conceptualised in terms of the types of parasociality that different blog types are associated with.

Another salient theme to emerge from this research was the tendency for blog readers to place an importance on the interaction between fellow readers despite refraining from such interaction themselves. In addition, blog readers generally expressed a limited desire for offline interaction with the blogger.

For those unfamiliar with parasocial theory, it is a scientific concept to describe a particular type of one-sided relationship, where one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not. The most common form of such relationships are those shared between celebrities and audience or fans (the fans feel they intimately know the celebrity, however the celebrity knows very little, if anything, about their individual fans).

The core difference between what is commonly considered a parasocial relationship (eg. a fan and a celebrity) and the relationship shared between bloggers and their non-blogging readers is that blog readers don’t have great aspirations to meet the blogger in person. This is more closely related to the relationship seen between an author and their readers.

For instance, a novel may have sold over a million copies and many of those readers will continue to purchase new work released by that author, but only a small percentage of that audience show an interest in meeting face-to-face.

The only other point I wanted to make in reference to Bo’s findings (and this is purely from my own experience and observation), is that bloggers in the search optimisation and search marketing industries do (generally) show a genuine interest in connecting with their readers.

This could be because many of us are social media enthusiasts, or simply appreciate that our whole discipline is based on continually changing algorithms, so the more connections we have, the more people we liaise with, means the more information we can use to establish our SEO hypothesis.

So to further this research started by Bo, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding the relationships shared between bloggers and readers.