Will RSS Revolutionize Email Newsletters?

Hamid Shojaee just wrote me about a startup he's formed called Squeet. The service streams RSS feeds via email. Shojaee talks about it here on his blog. He also says that the service can update feeds as fast as every 30 minutes or in once daily digest emails. The latter is the approach competitors, such as FeedBlitz, pursue.

RSS feeds aren't going to replace email publishing any time soon. However, I do see a future for paid email newsletters that are powered by feed technology. Using RSS you could offer a paid newsletter service that is monetized with contextual ads (e.g. from AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network) and/or Amazon Associate links. I could easily see how someone might form a potentially profitable paid email newsletter company by combining three different services - FeedXS for publishing, FeedBurner for serving ads and FeedBlitz or Squeet for RSS to email conversion. You don't even need a blog. However, you do need proprietary content that's worth paying for if you want to monetize your newsletter.

Technorati Tags: Email, Newsletters

Comments

[Eric Giguere]

I use AWeber.com for my newsletter. One of the features they introduced recently was the ability to automatically broadcast a feed to a mailing list. It's a great little service that lets me post to my blog and still reach people who don't normally read blogs, people who still find email easier or more natural. I've created a separate mailing list for the blog, since a lot of the subscribers to my newsletter read the blog the traditional way. But I could easily have it sent out using the same mailing list. And yes, you can change the template to include ads if you wanted, though I don't do that.

The lesson is to not forget the "older" distribution methods when embracing the new ones.

I agree that you have to have very desirable content to get people to pay for it. Most newsletters these days are free and make their money on the "back end" via increased book sales, affiliate programs, word-of-mouth, etc.

If someone reading this wants to join AWeber, send me mail to get my affiliate link :-)

[Andrew Mitchell]

As an email newsletter consumer, I want my newsletters turned into RSS feeds so that I can read them in the same way I read my blogs. The nature of the content is often the same -- a collection of interesting but rarely urgent items -- that I want to read once a day during my "reading time". Personally addressed email is often different -- requiring timely attention and response.

Is there a service that can turn my email into RSS?