How much money is an RSS subscriber worth?
How much money is an RSS reader worth? This is a question that has been asked before and had many different answers. I believe you can't just look at each of your readers and assign a dollar value because a reader is much more than that. A reader gets involved in your community by commenting on posts and passing your content onto friends through social media and email. But because I blog in a niche that is so focused on money that many people (including myself) report on our earnings monthly I figured it would be a worth while question to pursue.
So I've created a list of the various blogs that offer earnings reports that I could find in a reasonable amount of time and divided the money they make by the number of RSS readers their blog has. When no RSS feed count was displayed on site, I used Feed Compare to help get a subscriber count. I will denote these entrants with an "*" mark.
RSS subscriber value in order of highest earning to lowest earning blogs:
John Chow RSS Value is $38,030.57/34896 = $1.09 per RSS subscriber
Entrepreneurs Journey RSS Value is $10,000/43757 = $.22 per RSS subscriber (There are no income reports but his blog states he makes $10,000 per month)
Zac Johnson RSS Value is $5,992.36/4040 = $1.48 per RSS subscriber
Tyler Cruz RSS Value is $5,859.46/1748 = $3.35 per RSS subscriber
The Net Fool RSS Value is $1,304.45/703 = $1.86 per RSS subscriber
Money Bites RSS Value is $574.91/301 = $1.91 per RSS subscriber
Inspired Money Maker RSS Value is 469.98/1506 = $.31 per RSS subscriber
Blueverse RSS Value is $440/938 = $.47 per RSS subscriber
Blog From Scratch RSS Value is $322.92/123 = $2.63 per RSS subscriber
Chris Guthrie RSS Value is $205/155 = $1.32 per RSS subscriber
*One Man's Goal RSS Value is $124/765 = $.16 per RSS subscriber
The Daily Dollar Report RSS Value is $90/29 = $3.10 per RSS subscriber
Greg Ellison RSS Value is $55.75/11 = $4.80 per RSS subscriber
*Tyler Ingram RSS Value is $26.21/68 = $.39 per RSS subscriber
Overall average RSS subscriber value on a per month basis is: $1.65 each
While there are some obvious issues with the way I calculated the value of these RSS subscribers (i.e. using blogs that have less than 100 RSS subscribers and averaging their RSS value with blogs that have well over 1,000 subscribers) this is just to be used as a guideline. If you look at the top blogs on the list you can see they're somewhere near this average and this can also give you a good idea on how much money they make based on the way they run their blog.
For those of you that aren't on the list how does your number compare?
If you found this post interesting please feel free to use stumble upon or other websites to spread the love. Now just go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed so that I can make $1.32 per month from each of you (just kidding lol).
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It’s an interesting way to look at things, as, effectively it means that I could spend up to $3 per new RSS acquisition and still make a profit. In fact, I could spend probably $15 and still profit as most RSS subscribers stay subscribed month after month.
However, it is also a bit misleading to look too much into that for a number of factors, but as a rough guide, it’s definitely something interesting to note.
Tyler Cruz´s last blog post..Vegas BlogWorld Trip Day 3, Part III
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Hey Tyler,
Yes and I wanted to make sure I made that clear after tossing out the overall average. I took several statistics classes in college and this is most certainly not the most ideal way to analyze data.
It’s much better to look at the individual number for each person’s RSS per subscriber value and then look at the blog post I’ve linked to so you can see how they made that money.
Thanks for the comment
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I think if you are actually trying to figure it out, subscribers are probably worth a lot more or less, depending on the niche and the site itself (what they offer).
That was a fun list to view though, great idea!
Cheers!
Jay
SuiteJ´s last blog post..What’s On Your Desk… And What Does That Say About You?
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Hey Jay, yes this list would only be relevant to blogs in this niche. I’m sure a subscriber to a TV review website would be worth more than one for $5 comics (yes odd example).
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Thanks for the link love.
Great approach to figuring out how much a subscriber is worth based on earnings. Now if only I can start making double or triple my current earnings in the next couple months so that the subscriber worth is much more lol
David´s last blog post..Starbucks Gift Cards Giveaway
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Thanks for the link to my blog. Nice job on figuring How much my RSS Subscribers are worth to me. Thanks Greg Ellison
Greg Ellison´s last blog post..On Call Day Two
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Awesome write up. Another thing to keep in mind is the branding power and sales power of the blog. Many blogs can sell ads for much more than others strictly because of their branding or how they manage they ad locations.
Zac Johnson´s last blog post..Halloween Affiliate Programs… or lack there of!
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Super interesting and some great points you’ve made. It always helps to put value in perspective when you can see numbers and names.. funny how that works?!?
Elijah´s last blog post..Friday Update With Veronica
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Using your way to calculate my RSS value is about $ 3.05. I think i’m going well. don’t you? I have 30/40 subscribers and earn about $110 per month.
Michael´s last blog post..SMALLVILLE – 3º episodio – 8ª temporada – DOWNLOAD em AVI e RMVB Legendado
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Damn, I guess I need to step it up!!
StartBreakingFree.com´s last blog post..Business Plans Are Bullshit
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Interesting spin on things, and thanks for including my blog! I think that you need to stress more that you are doing things based on most recent earnings… as I was a bit confused for awhile exactly where you were getting the blog values. Keep in mind that subscribers should be worth where the total blog is worth, not just one months of earnings. Otherwise, it is subscriber value per month… which is effectively what you have done.
The Net Fool´s last blog post..Blogging “Trackbacks” – The Good, the Bad and… the Profitable?
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[...] Chris Guthrie – How Much Money is an RSS Subscriber Worth? [...]
[...] over at ChrisGuthrie.net talks about the value of RSS subscribers. He even listed a few top blogger’s value of RSS subscribers. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: [...]
Hey Jim,
Yah I thought that based on the way I wrote it people could tell it was done on a per month value.
If you multiplied the value by 12 than you could see what their value is for a year.
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[...] How Much Money is an RSS Subcriber Worth? – Chris Guthrie [...]
Nice post mate, while I don’t think readers like to be tagged with a price, it’s interesting to have a look at Profit Vs Rss. Maybe another way to look at it would be to have an index based on 100 subscribers. So the average index would be something like 165, which means 165$/100 subscribers. Readers are happier this way and we get the same result hehe
Ben – frogstr.com´s last blog post..How to fake Feedburner subscriber count
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Nice to see how much my subscribers are worth! What about the value of followers on twitter? Would they have more worth?
Tyler Ingram´s last blog post..PHP: Easy Way To Limit Words In a String and WordPress
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