Three annoying things that will get me to unsubscribe from my favorite blogs

This isn’t aimed directly at any of you dear readers. I know I don’t have a ton of you, and each of you is precious. I do subscribe to a lot of blogs though so I want to talk about the three things that a few of my soon-to-be ex-favorite blogs do.

1. Put commercials in their feeds.

I subscribe to Hugh Macleod’s blog because I like his cartoons and his writing. Now I get a cartoon every couple of days but a lot of time it’s part of a commercial. Here’s a recent example: ‘I drew this cartoon for Posterous, the fab photo-sharing site...’ hyperlinking to it and all. Recently he even included a cartoon that advertised free shipping on prints from his site. That’s not what I thought I was getting when I subscribed.

2. The posts are too long and come too often.

I subscribe to the Lefsetz letter as I’ve mentioned before. He may be talking about Lady GaGa for the 500th time, but he usually makes it about music and technology and art. The problem (and what is ultimately going to make me unsubscribe) is that his posts are super long and they come constantly. Sometimes I get three or four emails from him a day. It’s getting to the point where I read the first line or two and I shove off to somewhere else. I feel sort of bad about unsubscribing; I would like maybe one a week. But getting too many emails (even from someone you like) feels sort of spammy. If you had four voice mail messages from the same person everyday that would be annoying, no?

3. Make me go to your site to read the entire post.

This is the least offensive of the three but still something that a few blog sites do, and it bugs me. The reason I subscribe is so that I don’t have to go to your site to read what you write. So why are sending me back there? Is it for the traffic? At least tell me it’s for the traffic. Maybe I’m fine with it.

Early next week I’ll put up some of the things that get me to subscribe to blogs. For now, leave a comment and tell me about annoying blog behavior I should avoid for the future. I’d love to learn what else not to do.