Subscriber Survey Results

Posted by Al on March 3rd, 2008 .

Last week, to coincide with the launch of the email version of our feed we ran a quick survey on how you followed your favourite sites. Well the results are in:

votes.jpg

The data set is pretty tiny with only 75 votes, which also tells a story. We currently have ~1400 RSS subscribers (time to add the feed count to the sidebar) and ~500 visitors yet out of those only 74 took a few seconds out to vote. So that’s a conversion rate (so to speak) of 4%, my conversion rate at Amazon is better than that :) .

The results clearly show that RSS is the most popular way for following sites with our tech savvy audience. Nearly a quarter of the RSS subscribers use a headline aggregator (iGoogle, MyYahoo, etc ) and then only follow a storey if the title looks interesting, which emphases how important it is to have a good post title (maybe we should include numbers :) )

Next up I’d like to say a massive thanks to everyone who took the time to vote and also those who participate here via the comments, it’s really appreciated and is something I should do more myself.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 and is filed under Miscellaneous . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

RSS feed | Trackback URI

8 Comments »

Comment by Justin Cook from SEO Toronto Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-03 16:35:42

Yeah, but I wonder how many people selected RSS, when they do in fact use the RSS feed on their iGoogle homepage, and didn’t understand that it was actually a different option…

Comment by Al from Al Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-03 18:13:02

That’s a good point Justin, must admit I never thought of that option when I created the poll.

 
 
Comment by Ian from Disney World Tickets
2008-03-03 17:16:39

So is the email every day/post or rolled up weekly?

Comment by Al from Al Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-03 18:13:36

There’s an email every day when there is one or more posts.

 
 
Comment by Andrew Flusche from Legal Andrew Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-03 18:57:28

Hi Al,

I’m glad to know I’m not the only person whose polls have poor participation rates.

I’m surprised by how many people just go directly to the site. I guess they do the old-fashioned method of visiting bookmarked sites regularly. Maybe we should still encourage people to bookmark us. Perhaps we’re alienating those readers when we just ask them subscribe to our feed.

Comment by Al from Al Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-03 20:17:53

Participation rate is a much better term than conversion rate, thanks Andrew. That’s a really good point about bookmarking, I generally only push the RSS and email but you’re absolutely right we should be pushing bookmarks as well. Thank you.

 
 
Comment by Bruno Silva from adStrategist
2008-03-03 21:20:49

I guess people still can’t say thank you for what they learn online.
My vote and my comments are my way to say thank you for your inspirational posts.

I suppose most guys should stick to JohnChow and see what he eats in 50% of the posts he makes… very usefull if you ask me… :rolleyes:

 
Comment by Tom Beaton from Tom Beaton @ Technogumption Subscribed to comments via email
2008-03-04 02:20:49

You cannot actually comment or vote within google reader, so you have to visit the site as well to participate. This makes people a bit more selective about where they spend their time.

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI (Optional)
Twitter Name (optional)
Title (optional, will be used as link text for top commentators)
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.