Newsletters are also the best way to get visitors to return to your site. Far superior to RSS. It's the difference between being one of dozens or hundreds of feeds in a reader and reaching into a person's inbox. Jakob Nielsen wrote an Alert Box about this.
And as a site owner, it has the bonus of being much easier to track than RSS. It's difficult to quantify how many people "read" your RSS feed in a week. But it's pretty easy to count how many people loaded the images in your email or clicked a link.
Dosn't email clients such as gmail automatically block images though? How do you track it?
Click thru links
The short answer is: give people a reason to unblock images on your messages.
Ah, clever! Thank you.
Yeah, but (and I'm only one data point) I always click the "Always display images from .." link whenever I open a legitimate e-mail that looks like it's missing images, so they get to track me and I get to see a complete mail ;-)
Generally true (for the mass market), but there are some significant areas where e-mail is next to useless versus RSS - certain highly technical areas, programmers, etc.
Of course the real money is B2B, not B2C. The more desirable your audience is to advertisers (e.g. corporate IT managers), the more you can charge for ads.
Through consulting I've seen the numbers, and I wonder why more people don't push to get users e-mail adresses and send newsletters. This is partuciularly true if you sell something online.
I find Sarah Lacy's views intriguing, and wish to subscribe to her newsletter.
This is very true. I am still amazed at how much revenue gets generated from email still. I wish I could share some numbers.