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Tuesday
Jan052010
Email Newsletter Subs Trump RSS - Study
Young Urban Professional
Borrowing a page from Matt Cutts, for January I am trying a 30-day challenge - to reduce my use of RSS. I am trying to only dip into Google Reader as a data warehouse. I am finding that email newsletters, Gmail filtering and Twitter lists/Listimonkey maybe all I need. It simplifies my streams.
Anybody else seeing a shift to email newsletters? E-marketer reports that companies are increasingly integrating email and social media.
Reader Comments (20)
I see similar stats on my blog, Steve!
RSS reading via G Reader is just overwhelming because you cant 'delete' read items and 'archive' items like you can do with email. So no wonder people are just preferring reading via email or via the website rather than through RSS.
@Mohan I also think email is more ingrained in business users' habits.
Interesting. I am actually making a conscious effort to switch twitter off more often, get alerts via Boxcar and try to dig into the content of Google Reader more focused, for longer stretches.
I wouldn't say I have seen a shift to email newsletters but I have an huge increase. I don't read as many RSS feeds as I used to but I have no plans to rely just on Twitter/twitter list or email newsletters for information.
Clearly email has the comfort factor, but most users don't have the time to understand how filtering and aggregation work. Give me 30 minutes with a business user, a few industry-specific feeds, and something like Feedly, and I guarantee I could take away your email subscriber.
I find it completely unsurprising that e-mail out ranks RSS feeds but not for the reasons usually cited by the gurus and the "early adopter" types.E-mail is simpler than RSS. It is older. Most Internet users are more comfortable with e-mail than they are with RSS. That will continue to be the trend for a long time. Twitter will not kill RSS, neither will any other real time technology. The biggest challenge to RSS is inertia.people will continue to use e-mail because they already know how to use e-mail. Most people cannot be bothered to learn a new technology, even if "new" means "invented over a decade ago, and considered old-fashioned by the technorati."A statistic like this does not show a trend away from RSS, but rather its lack of adoption among the unwashed masses. Some of us about will continue to love our RSS readers. For example I would not have come to this blog and commented had it not been for it appear just now in my Google reader stream.
Not suprising as you say. Outside the tech field, I don't think many people use RSS.For me personally, Twitter Lists have changed the way I find good stuff. Creating a Twitter list with selected sources can be just as good, if not better, than RSS. I can see myself moving more and more of my reading to Twitter Lists compared to my Google Reader. Google Reader still rules at the moment though...
Read your earlier post on your switch to Twitter lists from Google Reader. An interesting move.While I use Twitter frequently, G Reader is still my go-to for news aggregation. My main reasons: 1. It's a single point to go to (along the GTD concept of a single inbox)2. I can easily star a post to revisit later3. It's works on my iPhone, which gives me a lot of opportunities to catch up on news remotely, then revisit later (tied to starring)My main concern being #1, having multiple points to have to check in on. Curious how you're flagging things for followup via Lists? Favoriting?
Email is the most important tool created in last (a lot, you fill it) years.Most people have never left it (the masses).Others (the early adopters) have tried to take things out from email because it was too cluttered. But then they cluttered and multiplied their streams. And now they need email again to find the important things in one single place. In the future I'm sure this movement will repeat back and forth.
I personally prefer rss. I auto-archive newsletters, especially if they happen too often, and adding a site to my daily bookmarks takes a substantially fantastic community. If there is an rss feed, however, I will continue to read content from the site since I can just skip/mark-as-read anything I don't want to bother with. I agree with some of the previous responders that email rules simply because most people don't know about nor understand rss.
E-mail still trumps RSS. Wish there was more SM attention to e-mail best practices and providers.
For me, it makes sense to offer email subscription as an option in addition to RSS for readers to choose how they like to receive their updates. Because I understand RSS and have created a workflow that rox my sox, I find it more useful than creating email filters. I'm not diligent going through emails that have been filtered away from my inbox. When I have a separate tool to read my news/updates, like Google Reader, I can focus on just reading through my feed headlines. That said, I hope RSS as an option does not go away because the masses prefer email.
Steve, why is it either/or? Subscribing to RSS via email is powerful, easy, and free with Feedburner, Mailchimp, and the like. I have over 4,000 subscribers across the many sites I run that have no clue they're consuming an RSS feed - its an email to them.
@Wayan - it doesn't. But RSS is stuck in neutral.
Thanks for sharing, Steve.I think you're dead-on about RSS being stalled as a delivery vehicle. Subscribing is too confusing. (Is there a badge for my reader, or must I paste in a feed URL?) And management across platforms is a pain. (Items viewed on mobile devices aren't tagged as "read" in web viewer or desktop client, etc.) Syndication is an amazingly useful technology, but the "simple" in RSS needs to apply as much to consumers as it does to publishers, or adoption will plateau. The Hubspot data are very interesting, but I'd love to know how many (if any) of the email subscribers are "legacy" e-newsletter subscribers who predate the availability of RSS feeds -- or even the blogs attached to those feeds.I'd also like to know what the stats are on how many of those e-mails are opened. I'm just a solitary data point, of course, but I've been guilty of subscribing to e-newsletters in exchange for white papers or other premiums, only to find the downloads (and the newsletters) useless. In some cases, I've continued to receive (and immediately trash) those newsletters for a long time before getting around to unsubscribing. They remind me of controlled-circulation journals I used to get after letting reps swipe my trade-show badge; if the first issue or two didn't prove useful, subsequent copies would go into the circular file, still in their plastic-bag mailers.By contrast, unwanted RSS feeds clutter up my reader, and I trash them mercilessly -- a process that's often inversely easier than setting up the subscriptions in the first place.Absent more meaningful data -- which I'd love to see -- my gut makes me think RSS subscribers would generally be more "qualified" (in the sense of commitment to blog content, if not desirability as "target readers"), than those who subscribe to e-newsletters. Does anyone know of research that addresses that issue?Cheers,Jim Akin
On the study, was it specific industries? My guess is it varies depending on the content/feed...
doesnt sound right to me, but what the hey...henry@bonnycastle.us
Sounds interesting. I wonder how valid it is. I have some futher question please email me newsomewilliam@hotmail.comthank you.
I just dont understand?