
RSS Subscribers or Twitter Followers: Which Are Worth More? - peter123
http://gigaom.com/2009/08/01/rss-subscribers-or-twitter-followers-which-are-worth-more/
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alain94040
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.

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

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Dauntless
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.

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aneesh
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.

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redorb
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 ...

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shalmanese
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?

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imp
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.

