FeedBlitz Hits One Million!

FeedBlitz founder and president Phil Hollows announced today that the service has hit the million mark in circulation (each subscriber to each blog counts as one).  This is great news for the leader in RSS-to-email services (and for me as an investor and board member). Just six days ago, the fourteen month old company passed the 900,000 milestone so they’re clearly on a roll.

According to Phil, this success means “…that email is an essential communications component for RSS, bloggers and their readership. It means that the technical and economic opportunities created by uniting RSS and email are compelling for publishers and marketers.”

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is an essential tool bloggers and other website publishers use to distribute fresh content to readers.  But most readers (and, more important, potential readers) don’t have the foggiest idea what RSS is or how to use it.  Just as most people are blissfully unaware of SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) despite the fact that they use SMTP-based email every waking hour of every day.

What FeedBlitz does is let readers get fresh website content as email (only, only, only if they ask for it and confirm that they asked for it) rather than having to go to the website every day to see if something new has been posted.  From a publisher’s POV, FeedBlitz makes it possible to get newly-posted content to subscribing readers with no additional effort.  Of course, there are all kinds of FeedBlitz tools for publishers to customize the look of the email that reaches their customers and to get metrics on what customers’ reaction to this email is.

You, the reader, can use FeedBlitz to subscribe to any website which supports RSS subscriptions.  This is very easy on websites like Fractals of Change and hackoff.com and many others which support and link to FeedBlitz directly.  It is a little more complicated on websites which haven’t done this (yet).  You have to get the address of the RSS feed usually from a link to the RSS feed in a sidebar (hint: this link may well be an orange box which says either RSS or XML) and paste this link into feedblitz.com.  Free, of course.

You, the publisher, can make this process much easier for your readers AND probably gain many regular readers as well by signing up for either FeedBlitz free or premium (paid) service.

Why this is important (and why I invested in it) is that distribution is essential to both readers and publishers; RSS is a great technical mechanism for accomplishing distribution; email is the most comfortable way for most of us (especially non–nerds) to get the information we want to subscribe to distributed to us.  And Phil saw this need early and build a service to meet it which he’s kept improving ever since.

Congratulations, Phil.