RSS Eclipsing Email?

The Alex Barnett Blog posted a link to the whitepaper, “RSS – Crossing into the Mainstream” (authored by Ipsos Insight and Yahoo!).

In the study they found that “very few users (4%) knowingly uses RSS, over one quarter of Internet users (27%) enjoy the benefits of RSS without knowing it. These ‘Unaware RSS Users’ are similar demographically to the average Internet user, suggesting that RSS is not just for the tech-savvy few.”

Alex points out that this study found that 31% of Internet users are RSS users. This represents 72.8 million in the US and UK and 275.4 million in the World!

Rok Hrastnik, MarketingStudies.net, cites from the latest Pheedo study that RSS feed click-through rates range from 7-11%. Compare this to DoubleClick’s statement that the average email CTR is only 8.3%.

Rok also mentions that the site Lockergnome.com is seeing a ratio of 5:1 of RSS subscribers against email subscribers. Rok goes on to state that this site is seeing a 500% better CTR with RSS than with email.

To add a little more fuel to the fire, The New York Times has seen page views stemming from RSS feeds increase 342% from March 2004 to March 2005, with no special effort to market RSS (link).

eINFO – a collection of articles and studies about email marketing.