Should Readers Get Paid to Read?

Introduction

In the world of blogging, we often stress the importance of the writer. We follow the lives of prolific bloggers who are amazing at what they do in capturing our interest in an online marketplace for attention. 

Interestingly, however, we have never stopped to ask ourselves about the role of the reader. The reader is simply taken for granted and presumed to exist out there ‘somewhere’, where they are often thought of as the party that is ‘fortunate’ enough to be reading the amazing work of the writer. 

But what if the writer is the one who is fortunate enough to have the reader?

Since Day 1, the team at BULB has strongly believed the reader is just as important as the writer and should be rewarded. Read on to find out why!

The One-Sided Reader-Writer Relationship 

BULB’s philosophy is that the reader-writer relationship is ‘symbiotic’, meaning you cannot have one without the other. Again, there is no writer without the reader, and vice versa. As far as the reader is concerned, you cannot have a reader unless the writer has written something for them to read. Similarly, the writer does not build brand recognition, status or an income unless they have a community of readers that willingly engages with their work. 

What becomes important is that both groups of people in this relationship are rewarded in a way that is commensurate with the effort they put in. From the dawn of blogging, the writer has typically been the party that earns more rewards in the form of recognition and financial incentives. 

The reader, however, has been largely left to their own devices and are the ones who find themselves paying subscriptions for content that is locked behind paywalls. Readers are also afforded less recognition within blogging communities and are not even offered any financial reward for engaging with the writer’s content. 

Unfair? Undoubtedly! 

How Might Readers Get Rewarded? ⚖️

Rewarding the reader is quite simple. 

Readers can be rewarded for their membership to a community through recognition for their outstanding contributions as people who engage and share content. Imagine if a blogging platform was like a shopping loyalty program where for every article read, the reader collects ‘points’, and the more points they collect the more perks they can enjoy. This way, the reader is duly recognised for the commitment and loyalty to other writers. 

This is just one possible way for how the reader can be rewarded. It’s time that platforms change the uni-directional nature of how content is consumed by recognising that parties on both sides of the equation are equally as important, and that both of them should be compensated.

Let us know if you think readers should also always be rewarded below...