[Sigia-l] RSS users more engaged

[Listera]

If you ever found yourself in a position to advocate the use of RSS, you
more than likely got the argument that it will diminish actual website
traffic: people will just scan the RSS feeds and won't bother to come to the
site to see more.

Nielsen//NetRatings has a new study out which pretty much contradicts that
counter-argument:

RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users,
visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for
non-users.

Not only do RSS users visit more news Web sites than non-users, they also
visit those sites more frequently. RSS users visited the top 20 news Web
sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites
four times as often. This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties
may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS.

Notably, 83 percent of survey respondents who were identified by clickstream
data as RSS users were unaware that they were using RSS technology.

Among RSS users who understood the technology, 78 percent were male, and 48
percent were longtime Internet users who have been going online since at
least 1994. [1]

"Men tend to be early and aggressive technology adopters, but it may come as
a surprise that the youngest Internet users were not the most RSS savvy...²

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_050920 (PDF)

[1] Conclusively proving once again that older men are just smarter than
the rest, even if they may be lazier when living in Europe. :-)

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.