Opting In

In her article on RSS feeds, Amy Gahran writes:

Almost every established e-mail publisher I know right now is finding it nearly impossible to keep their subscription list from inexorably shrinking, largely due to this address turnover phenomenon. Often, an address that was subscribed only a few weeks or months before will suddenly start bouncing. If your bounce rate is climbing, that’s a good indicator that you should implement a webfeed and promote it as an option to your audience. This strategy could preserve your readership in the long run.

I'm skeptical. Considering the relatively low penetration of "RSS feed" technology in mainstream America, I really doubt that offering webfeeds to political newsletter readers would be successful to the extent Gahran claims. My observation has been that online supporters are made up of a lot of novice tech users who subscribe to political lists as a way of keeping updated with the campaigns and issues they care about. More importantly than their inexperience with technology (and this is assumed-- I'd like to see some research on it), their subscriptions to these newsletters are usually timed around an issue or candidate campaign. I'm not sure that users who are juggling a number of subscriptions are unhappy with the situation.

The tricky part is once the campaign is over... then the newsletters get old. I'm so sick of hearing from John Kerry (you lost, Senator! Move on! (literally)) that I do agree with Gahran that there has to be, at some point, a way of keeping track of subscriptions.