If you don’t RSS now, you’ll hate yourself later

Posted by Laura Bergells

February 7, 2007

All over the blogosphere, you see bloggers asking people to subscribe to their blogs with RSS.

The problem is, RSS is not intuitive for most audiences. It is not like the early, easy days of email. Back in the day, you asked your audience to enter their email addresses and hit “Subscribe”. You promised not to spam them, and they trusted that you would not.

But this whole RSS thing… Now, you tell your audience to subscribe with RSS, and 90% of them think, “What the heck is that and why should I?” And you can tell them that RSS will keep their private info anonymous and cut down on spam and make them better, faster, more efficient web information consumers…but many web surfers just plain don’t get the benefit. To them, it’s just one more complicated thing in their already too-complicated lives.

So I performed a little RSS v. Email experiment… I put up two subscription options at this site on January 17, 2007. One for RSS, and one for email. With an RSS subscription, my audience can subscribe anonymously and get updates in their free feedreaders. With an email subscription, my audience gets an automatically generated email every time I update the site with fresh content.

So which subscription option won with the most new sign-ups?

It was email, hands-down. I even made it harder to subscribe to email by making it a double opt-in. Double opt-in means that the email subscriber has to verify that they want to receive my emails in a separate email!

So, in less than a month, I generated new 155 email subscribers — people who “don’t do” or “won’t do” RSS.

What this means for online business: Give your audience subscription options. You might be in love with email, but your audience may prefer RSS. And vice-versa. If you aren’t offering both RSS and email updates, you risk alienating a significant portion of your audience.

What this means for audiences: Give RSS a chance. If you don’t RSS now, you will hate yourself later. Although I will not use your email address and private information to spam you, giving out your private information to online strangers (who seem nice) is getting riskier and riskier with every passing day (just look at your inbox. Is that spam problem really getting any better?)

What’s more: an RSS feedreader or aggregator lets you save time. You can quickly scan your subscriptions to see if anything has changed or if anything is worth your attention. This business of bookmarking pages and going to visit each one individually? It’s a waste of valuable time. Using RSS will allow you to become smarter, because you will be able to digest more information, more quickly.

Bottom line for online businesses AND audiences: if you don’t RSS now, you’ll hate yourself later.

Subscribe with RSS today!