Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

Post by bjterry » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

revicon wrote: post #37

bogomipz wrote: post #35

Tangential question here - can anyone comment on the recent-ish proliferation(explosion) of sites thats float an HTML 5 light box a few seconds after the page loads asking people to "Sign up now for our newsletter!" It's a pretty obnoxious practice. Newsletters aren't new of course but there seems to be a very enthusiastic renewed interest in them. Does anyone know why?

Two reasons I've heard, but haven't tested out personally yet: 1) The pop up results in higher conversions (people actually filling out the email address field and hitting "subscribe") 2) The action of "closing" the modal popup confirms that the viewer of the page is probably a real human and that they genuinely made some kind of movement on the page (scrolling slightly, moving the mouse off the window, etc). This is…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

Post by chriswarbo » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

ommunist wrote: post #59

chriswarbo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what level of abstraction you're working at. At the level of sockets, you're right that a mail server receives a connection from a sender when a newsletter is sent, whilst an RSS aggregator initiates connections to each feed's source when it polls, even if there are no new articles. At a lower level, the server's doing polling to check for new connections, but that's a fast local operation so it doesn't br…

You are quite correct. But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. Emails are ok, everyone 'knows' what the email is? But 'feed'. Can I save it for offline use? Can I forward it to friends and family?

Post by ourcat » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 7:01 PM UTC

Post by DubiousPusher » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

olivierlacan wrote: post #54

While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher. With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least doub…