From the Desk of Janet Barclay

I don’t know if I’m typical, but I receive way more ezines than I can possibly read. Some I signed up for, hoping I’d have the time to read them. Others I signed up for in order to receive a free e-book or other information of interest. And then there are those people who just took it upon themselves to add me to their subscriber list because I bought something from them or they received my business card at a networking event (a big no-no) or found my email address online (an even bigger no-no). For a long time, I was putting them all in a Reading folder until I could get to them, but when it reached 100, I realized it was time to take action.

In an effort to be realistic, I deleted most of them, unsubscribed from quite a few, and am not signing up for any more. This whole experience has made me wonder how many of the people who receive my ezine, The Organized Assistant Resource, are actually reading it. Over the past month I conducted a survey to learn how people are using blogs and social networking sites to gather and share information and to establish and build relationships, and one of the other things I wanted to explore in the survey was whether people still read ezines.

I included a request in my ezine for readers to complete the survey, and only 4% of the subscribers responded. I realize this doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of people who read the issue, as some people don’t like to complete surveys, and others may not have thought it pertained to them because of the way I worded the request (something I didn’t realize until it was too late).

In any case, the responses to my question How many electronic newsletters/ezines do you subscribe to? were as follows:

This tells me that if the majority of people subscribe to five or fewer ezines, and there are thousands to choose from, yours had better be pretty outstanding to make the cut! This is confirmed by the responses to my question How many do you actually read?

These numbers tell me that:

• Even though 95% of the people subscribe to at least one ezine, only 91% actually read any.
• Even though 45% of the people subscribe to 6 or more ezines, less than half of those are getting read.

This not being a scientific survey, I decided to do a little additional research into the subject and came across an article, Why Blogs Are Beating Out Ezines … And Matter So Much to Your Platform, in which Suzanne Falter-Barns states that the ezine is dead and that blogs have taken over as a means of getting one’s message out. Surprisingly, this article was written in 2005! This is of course, just one person’s opinion, but it is still very interesting.

What are your thoughts on this subject?