Hubspot has been studying the subscription methods used by followers of 605 of their small and medium sized business customers’ blogs, and they have found some fairly surprising results.
Blog subscriptions were found to be far more popular through email than through RSS.
In fact, Hubspot noticed that the average number of email subscriptions was almost 12 times the average number of RSS subscriptions. They investigated this trend within a number of different industries, and found that the trends were more or less consistent across the board.
Blog followers in most of the industries, such as consulting and business services, medicine and biotech, retail, real estate, banking and finance, education and even non-profit and government organisations, follow the same trend of having higher email subscriptions than RSS subscriptions.
There are some exceptions to this rule, however. These were seen in the software industry and in the online marketing and SEO sector, where the difference in numbers is much smaller, and both email and RSS subscriptions are running neck-to-neck.
The technology industry also exhibits a similar trend. Though, the total number of email subscriptions here is much lower than the number of RSS subscriptions. Individually, almost 50% of the tech companies in Hubspot’s survey had more RSS subscriptions than email subscriptions.
One possible reason for this reverse trend is that these industries are more technologically advanced, and so, RSS may be used more effectively by their employees than by others.
RSS may eventually overtake email subscriptions as the medium of choice for blog readers once other industries also become more tech savvy.
