There’s a huge contest going on at the moment, John Chow and ShowMoney are going head to head in a month long challenge to see who can increase their RSS subscribers the most. Of course this is a clever peice of marketing, if either one of them attempted this same stunt on their own then if would never be half as effective (and for us bloggers the prizes they are dishing out wouldn’t be as good either). At the moment it looks like Chow has it with some amazing jumps in the last few days, hundreds at a time. What does seem strange is that both contestants have started adopting similar approaches, to get people who already subscribe to subscribe via as many different methods as possible. But why should this matter?
The truth is it doesn’t, unless you are somebody who takes notice of the RSS count when deciding a price. You see the RSS count is one very significant way in which bloggers set their advertising rates and services like ReviewMe and pay-Per-Post decide on a fair price. What John Chow and ShowMoney are effectively doing is saying I’ve got so many thousands of RSS subscribers but the truth is that after this competition they may end up with a huge amount of duplicate subscribers, affecting the number of eyes your advert on their feed is shown before. It amazes me how so many of the factors that advertisers deem important are so easy to fix, what is to stop me auto setting up a few thousands e-mail accounts and bumping my or anybody else’s RSS count? Even better why not pay a few dollars and have it done for me in
At the end of the contest both John Chow and ShoeMoney are going to have a way of justifying increased ad prices and for that reason it has worked very well, whether I’d want to be one of those advertisers or not is a very different question.
3 Responses to “Why Does RSS Size Matter?”
Thomas Sinfield
October 22, 2007
John and Shoemoney are getting so many new rss readers from their competition, it’s crazy!
I think for long term staying power in the blogging world you will always wanting to be increasing your rss count.
|Paul B
October 23, 2007
Ha ha, I come from a systems background so I always find it strange just how easy to “go around” so many of these statistics are that so many people rely on/set prices on.
One of the best ways to make money online is to take advantage of loopholes that exist, don’t think for 1 minute that there aren’t things out there that I don’t take advantage off
|(Although if I’d ever write about them here is another story)
jackbravo
October 23, 2007
Really what should do is the following (look at me making 3 cents a day online giving YOU advice), but anywway here it is:
I just finished reading your “Rich Jerk” article. How about if YOU started one of these so called clubs, but instead of junk, you can share your …uhumm..”loop holes”…and teach people how to use them. Of course, people would need to pay a premium for this information, but they’d gladly do it because it may actually be useful information. ANd of course this would need to be a limited, exclusive sort of thing.
See…I told you it was going to be good.
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