Yesterday I mentioned adding FeedBlitz to my blog to enable people to subscribe to blog updates via email. Was motivated to do this based on a hat tip from Fred Wilson. Bill Burnham weighs in on the whole "email is king" theme and also provides a case for using services like FeedBlitz and RSSFWD. The basic finding by most people is that RSS readership is low. Bill points to a post that indicates 11% of blog readers use RSS and 2/3rds of them don’t even know what RSS is.
I completely agree with this, which is why I added FeedBlitz in the first place.
That said, people should not forget that there may be some less developed research about the behavioral profile of those that use RSS (beyond traditional demographics of age, technological sophistication, etc.). An example study is here (hat tip: Robert Scoble) which says that 87% of "influencers" use RSS. In the study I point to here, influencers are defined as journalists, analysts, and bloggers. These are people that are in some sense promiscuous about spreading ideas … presumably to other readers. I speculate that the consequence of such a finding for personal versus corporate bloggers might vary.