There were days when RSS subscriptions was the key to determine how big a website you have or how authoritative you are in your domain. It is still that way, to an extent. Bloggers still try to earn as many RSS subscribers as they can to their website. But with newer cyber-lifestyle, people don’t follow blogs, but follow people who write those blogs on Twitter. People share interesting articles on social networks. All this begets the question – Are RSS subscribers still relevant to the bloggers today?

From a personal standpoint, RSS subscribers still score over Twitter followers and will continue to do so. Let me explore a few reasons why I think this is the case.

First and foremost, in most cases, bloggers write in order to provide an “authority site” on the subject, not project themselves as thought leaders in the area. That being the case, it makes sense that you project your blog’s authority over your individual authority. Yes, this rule does not apply to people owning blogs on subjects like marketing. There, indeed the focus is on showing yourself as a thought leader. But in cases where people own more than one blog on domains like fitness, technology and finance, it makes better sense to project the site’s authority than your own.

The second point is an extension of the first. In many cases, people own a lot of blogs. Some full time bloggers own even around 50 or 60 blogs on so many niche topics. It always makes sense to keep your different targeted groups separate so that you may promote niche products to these different groups. Imagine a case where you have blogs on varied niche and all of them follow you on a Twitter account. Your tweets cannot cater to the needs of each of these groups separately. Of course, you may always create more than one twitter account. However, that increases your workload since you will have to not only manage your individual blogs, but also these individual twitter accounts.

Thirdly, you OWN your RSS subscribers. You also give freedom to your loyal readers an option to read your articles via an RSS reader or email. In case of Twitter, you do not own those Twitter followers in the first place. Also, you are creating an additional barrier to loyal readers of yours by asking them to register first with a third party (Twitter) in order to follow you. With RSS, the freedom of choice is with the subscriber. Wait, you also have the option to monetize this traffic.

So does this all mean RSS is here to stay for a long time to come? No one is sure of the answer. RSS still has a few flaws like time-lag in crawling through the web and misuse (There have been cases where RSS followers were automatically subscribed to other mailing lists). But these have been very few and far between and with improving technology, we can surely expect RSS to remain a no-pushover for a long time to come.

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