What do killer bees, shark attacks and RSS have in common?

They are all over-hyped.

Anne Holland at Marketingsherpa finally says what everyone has been thinking (RSS is *Not* a Replacement for Email — Metrics & Best Practices), but didn’t want to say. Ok, maybe it is just me that didn’t want to be the ‘pooh-pooher’ this time. Thanks Sherpa for bailing me out.

Summary: RSS isn’t ready for prime-time, yet, and here are some solid numbers to prove it.

RSS versus email — the great non-debate

RSS seems to be safe, friendly, and familiar, why not go for it? Plus, it’s not yet riddled with email’s two biggest headaches — spam and spam filters. (We strongly suspect someday this will change, but for now RSS is an innocent playground.)

However, RSS is not email — nor is it an email replacement. It’s a different media channel. And just as every media channel does, creatively RSS has its own unique challenges, drawbacks, and problems.

The report goes on to detail RSS readership numbers.

How small is RSS usership? No one’s sure.

91% of US Internet users use email on a regular basis. Roughly 4% use RSS feeds on any sort of basis at all. (We say roughly because no one, including Pew, have currently been able to come out with data on RSS feed recipients that’s collected and reported in a way that satisfies statisticians. This will probably change soon, but we don’t expect that % to grow to two digits anytime soon.)

Finally, the piece covers tracking, or the lack thereof.

RSS’s biggest challenge of all — tracking and measurement

Currently most marketers, bloggers, and publishers don’t track anything about their feed whatsoever. They stick it up there, and that’s it. A few track how many clicks the links sent through RSS get. Another few (often a separate group) track how many site visitors click on the RSS button to start getting the feed. Practically no one tracks anything else… and there’s zero sophisticated tracking we know of at all.

No deliverability, open rates, hard vs soft bounces. No a/b tests, no usability tests, no offer tests, no recency/frequency tests, and multivariable testing is not even on the map. The kind of data that marketers and publishers rely on to make business, content, and marketing decisions for email campaigns is almost entirely lacking for RSS at this time.

So there you have it in black and white from a trusted source. Care to pose an argument to the findings? I’m curious as to what the business community thinks about RSS, please leave your feedback.