And, surprise surprise, of the 100 or so RSS feeds, many of them get a cursory glance, then get cleared off the reader.

I think many bloggers who have very large RSS feeds may be deeply fooling themselves as to the truth of the situation.

Our email list, which is in the mid-four figures, we’ve been able to build up enough trust to have 22% convert to paying customers, and many, many of them beyond that to return as repeat customers.

I have yet to see (and happy to be proven wrong) of an RSS feed list that has a conversion rate that high- in other words, has built that much trust with that many of their readers.

I’m not saying you can’t build trust with blog readers- of course you can. But because people sign up without having to give much trust, you have to do a lot more to build trust with them, it seems.

In other words, trust IS transitive but there isn’t enough trust in the RSS “relationship’ to pass along!

On the other hand, the email relationship has a higher level of trust… enough to “pass” that trust on to others.

It appears the old “the money is in the list” can’t be replaced with “the money is in the feed.”

VERY interesting!!!!

RSS subscribers effectively by becoming a subscriber might be giving me a small amount of their attention, but they are not giving me their trust.

If as a blogger I emphasise email subscriptions over RSS, then I am giving them a measurable option to trust me.
Once I have broken that barrier, the chance that the trust is transitive to give an email address to another recommended resource might be substantially increased.

There are many problems with the RSS model that might have been solved using RSS based Autoresponders, but some of those have died because of slow adoption, and feed sharing.