Do you know your reader base? Most people don't...

With all of the CSM information out there I thought I would put in a few quotes for you from various websites that I want to comment on. If you have not read the blog before this one, now would be the time to review that before you go on.

RELEASE THE RANTS!!!

"It's CSM season again, with CCP opening up candidacy officially for CSM8. This is the first CSM election which has cropped up since TheMittani.com has been active, so we have a question before us: do our readers, uh, care?"

"Coverage could range from specific candidate interviews (which I personally think are irrelevant and boring) to more high-level 'horse race' features where we analyze who is likely to win, who has bloc-level backing, and who are comedy candidates"

- by The_Mittani

I can take a shot at answering that for them. YES, your readers care (I am one of them at least that does) but I can tell you that all the other people out there that do not go to your website to read your posts DON'T.

Lets put this another way. You folks over at TMC know the numbers for your reading membership. Subtract that from the 500,000 reported Eve subscribers and I would care to guess that would be a fairly accurate number of people that DON'T care.

Throw into the mix that The Mittani does not feel that specific candidate interviews like the ones at Crossing Zebras count, then that number in fact may be even less then that. I think that as time goes on TMC is loosing touch with what the rest of Eve wants versus what they want. :-/

ok, on to the next interesting piece of internet Eve Online wisdom! This one come from Gevlon over at the Greedy Goblin and I find it to be what I would call pretty damn accurate.

"There is a common theme against the CSM platform of James 315 and the balancing of EVE economy at large: many people are high sec casual players, a new player will very likely start as a high sec casual and nerfing high sec would make them quit, ruining CCP."

and

"So a high sec casual can fully play his chosen game if he has a couple ten million ISK income per month. Even if his level of income doesn't allow him to buy a battleship or T3 in a year, it doesn't hurt his fun, just like it doesn't hurt the fun of lvl4 missioners that he can't earn for a titan or even fly it in high sec if he PLEX's one."

Here are 2 more interesting quotes. Lets tackle the first one...

How do you get to know the casual high sec player? They are not one of the people that read any of our blogs or forums if they have just started out in Eve. In some of the cases they have not even joined up with a corporation yet that they can call home. They are unguided, confused and don't quite know where they want to go or do yet. Nerfing High Sec is not a bad or good thing as a new player has no reference what it "should" be like.

How do they get to know what it "should" be like? Through others of course. Who are those others? People like James 315? People like you? People like me? In what ever case you choose it can be thed  players and it SHOULD be the players and not CCP in my humble opinion. I may not agree with James on his points but I do like the fact that he is taking an active part in trying to do SOMETHING.

I heard once before "if your not part of the solution you are part of the problem". Get your readers to buy into what your selling and who knows, maybe James will be on CSM.

On to the second quote...

These people that are not the readers are the people that play Eve for Fun. They are the gamers. Gamers play for fun. We, you and I and all the other bloggers, writers, pod casters, enablers, instigators and even the lurkers are the "hobbyists" of Eve.

Again, 2 different (or more) groups of Eve players. Only a small portion are our readers. How do we increase that? Well, we HAVE to learn about our readers. How do we do that? Good question.

Which brings me to the end of this blog since I could give you at least a dozen more examples but I don't want to bore you, only get you thinking.

I think that it is the CSM's job to work on this problem. How do THEY get more readers not only for themselves but for CSM and for CCP. If they can tackle that problem they don't need CCP's permission to do it. They only need the desire to do do it and then bring that increased reader base to the game with all of us as a voice with them being the tool to make it happen.

Make sense?

It does to me. ok, enough of this rant, more to write about in another blog.