I have just finished a very important task of unsubscribing from a number of blogs because I will be leaving for Chiangmai in 2 days and while I’m away, I want my Bloglines to only pick up feeds that I will read upon returning.

Which makes me think.. I am a fairly “quick” subscriber. It only takes me a couple of minutes on a certain blog and at least 2 posts with grammatically-correct sentences and I’m your new reader. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter very much to me whether you’ve got a pretty blog theme though that does help since I love to look at pretty things :) But if your theme isn’t appealing to me, I’d still subscribe to it :)

But what makes me unsubscribe from a blog? I unsubscribe from a blog if one of the following situation takes place:

• If the blog turns from ads-free to full-of-ads overnight. I’ve seen this happen. I’m not a blogging guru but I’ve learned enough to know that it isn’t a good idea to surprise your readers with a blog full of ads that they have to sieve through them before getting to the content.
• If the blogger churns out paid reviews blindly. I’ve mentioned before that I’m OK with paid reviews because I see them as advertisements in a movie. But if a blogger writes about products that I know she’s never used, or places she’s never been to or loans and mortgages that she’s never had, that’s it. I’m sorry but I take that as you’re bull-sh*tting me.
• If I haven’t been clicking though to leave you a comment in at least 2 weeks. Yes, you may have passed your English test and I may have subscribed to your blog but if I haven’t been leaving you a comment after 2 weeks, it only means that I’m not very interested in what you’re blogging about. It doesn’t mean that your blog is no good, it just means that I’m not interested, so please don’t take this personally.
• If the blogger never replied my comments. You see, I used to reply to my commentators’ comments on my blog, so naturally, I go back to a certain blog post to see whether the blogger acknowledges my comment. And I have also recently started emailing my responses to my “irregular” visitors because they may not come back to read my responses to their comments, so it would be a good idea to email them and to show that I do appreciate their time and feedback. But if I do not hear from a blogger after following her blog and leaving her comments regularly, I give up. I’d like to feel appreciated and acknowledged too, so if you choose to ignore me, that’s just too bad..

You may want to read about a similar topic posted by Lorelle at The Blog Herald, entitled Are you losing readers? Why? She discusses the main reasons readers turn away from a blog, based on her research on the issue for many years.

So tell me. What will make you unsubscribe from a particular blog?