Lockergnome: Why RSS Will Kill E-mail Publishing
This is author (and Lockergnome founder) Chris Pirillo's favorite theme these days, but as a guy who wrote the book "Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing" and who has one of the largest email newsletters on the Net, his opinion on the matter is not quickly dismissed. He gives 10 solid reasons to make his case.
Here's the one point that blew me away, showing there's a huge opportunity sitting on the table for someone: click here.
As far as I can tell, Rebecca Lieb is wrong a few points in her recent ClickZ article arguing against this idea that RSS will displace email. One point she made, which seemed correct to me at the time, I now think is incorrect: "Currently, RSS is ephemeral — headlines come, then they go. They aren't stored for later in an inbox, should a reader be offline or busy when they're live."
Until last night, I would have agreed with her, because I'd been through a series of unimpressive RSS readers. But last night I finally gave in to trying NewsGator, which lots of others around me raved about. (It integrates into Outlook, and since I use Eudora for email, I assumed it wasn't for me, till it occurred to me I could install it in Outlook and use that just for RSS and continue to use Eudora for email.) It's like a brand new day. I LOVE NewsGator, after 15 hours using it. One thing NewsGator does is save old RSS posts, which is great. So you can indeed reference back to them. In fact, with NewsGator, Olivier points out, you can forward indivual RSS posts and otherwise treat them just like email messages.
Lieb also says that RSS is not trackable. Again, I've since discussed this with Olivier, and of course it is trackable, as it's simply a file on the web server, so downloads of it (as most RSS readers download the file directly from the site syndicating it) will show up in the web server logs. At present, the popular tools for analyzing web traffic aren't configured to make proper sense of this (one issue is that many RSS readers by default refresh the file every hour, so it would look like lots of downloads; you'd have to solve for IP addresses to understand how many readers that really is), but that should be something the likes of WebSideStory could fix easily enough, if there were demand for it. Meanwhile, if you as a publisher were interested in tracking RSS, you could have a programmer customize that tracking pretty easily.
In fact, not only could you know how many readers there were by counting the IP addresses downloading the file every day, you should be able to track open rates as well, as RSS does support graphics, so you'd track it the same way you track open rates in email (someone would download the graphic only when they click on a particular item). In fact, you'd have a more granular way to track, as you'd see open rates by individual items, not just by the whole issue of the newsletter. You could see specifically which headlines for individual stories were generating the most interest.
Thinking more about it, it seems like you could just as easily deliver personalized content as well. It would just be a matter of building a custom engine on the back end that would spit out dynamic content in RSS format instead of dynamic email format, which is ASMOP ("a simple matter of programming").
Presently, an RSS publisher doesn't collect readers' individual addresses, like with email subscriptions, but I am aware of people working on subscription-based and even fee-based RSS feeds, as well, so we're bound to see that kind of registered RSS reader soon, I'd guess in a matter of months.
Ultimately, I don't know that RSS is going to truly supplant email for publishers and marketers entirely (e.g., I notice that Pirillo still asks for email addresses front and center on Lockergnome, above the RSS feeds), but I do agree that it will soon be a must-have for publishers, certainly, and probably many marketers as well. Lieb acknowledges this as well, though she suggests there is no hurry to jump on this wagon. I say, why not be ahead of the pack instead of a follower?
