RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More? | Hacker News Reader

RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More?

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13 pointspeter1237 comments

RSS of course, except for one thing: there is no viral aspect to RSS. If you belong to my feed, no one else knows. Your friends don't know. At least with twitter, once you follow me, people who like you may check out who you follow (assuming it's not in the thousands :-)

Other people here quoted a ratio of 10 to 1. That sounds about right. How the viral aspect (and growth) of twitter changes that number when you look at tour subscriber growth over a year, I don't know.

RSS Subscribers ofcourse. They have both the desire to actually read what you write and the ability to read more than 140 characters.

Also if RSS is integrated in the browser (e.g. like in Opera) users are always notified and they are more up to date. While on Twitter accounts may be checked a lot more sporadic.

My anecdotal evidence definitely agrees with these conclusions. My Twitter click-through rates are pretty low. In fact, the best clickthrough rate I get is from people who subscribe to my blog via email.

as far as which can be monetized with the ease currently vs in the future ...

I think RSS subscribers are currently worth more; but the potential for new developments which can monetize it better than current models... is low in my thinking...

On the other hand Twitter, hasn't been really monetized at all either by twitter itself or 3rd parties... so the potential should be greater as long as its not 0 :) , Then again - having your message hit 100's of cellphones of your followers is really cool and more connecting then hitting 1000's of rss inbox's ...

Well, yeah, it's obvious twitter followers are worth less. I would have liked, even as a WAG, just how many twitter followers is worth one RSS subscriber?

Anyone got any anecdotal evidence?

You can look at the number of clicks/views generated by each. I read once that Ashton Kutcher tweeted about a service which reported the number of visits from his tweet equated to about 3% of his follower base at the time. He probably gets a lot of RTs, but we can use that as an estimate. For RSS subscribers, I've seen roughly a 25% "reach" via Feedburner. So, that would mean 1 RSS subscriber = 8 twitter followers. That's assuming you have all legitimate, natural twitter followers and haven't tried to inflate your twitter count. It probably varies greatly by the types of users and quality of content.

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