I grew the blog to 25,000 RSS subscribers (as measured by FeedBurner) between 2006 and 2010 but the engagement and what those readers actually do pales in comparison to my 15,000 e-mail subscribers who click more and open more in vastly greater levels. I now believe, like many, that the numbers FeedBurner give out are mostly BS and don't give any hint of engagement at all.
Separate to this I've built a 30k strong JavaScript e-mail newsletter without any blog. This is a larger regular subscription base than most other JavaScript related sites I know of.. with the exception of Ajaxian which is now half dead.
So I can't say for sure because maybe I could make a blog work better, but in terms of engagement, how much money I can earn, etc, e-mail has been a huge win over blogging.
Not everyone uses an RSS reader and people forget to check blogs. I have most of my favourite blogs bookmarked, but every now and then I come across a blog I used to read occasionally and just forgot about, or end up googling for a blog or web site I vaguely remember seeing once.
There are a few online 'magazines' I read published in PDF form. I really wish they'd send out an email when a new issue comes out with a link to download it, but as it is I keep forgetting to visit the web site regularly to get the latest copy.
For many people, email is still the main push protocol they use to receive content and it's still useful even to those of us that also use other options.
About 3 months in, with the encouragement of an email marketing guru, I started emailing people every week. People didn't unsubscribe. In fact they wrote me to tell me how valuable my little newsletter was to them. People all over the world told me it was the only newsletter from a company they read because they learned something new every week. They even forwarded it to other people in their company.
In the end, we launched, and I spun out the newsletter into it's own thing. There are over 1000 people who want me to write them an email every week. If you asked most people in tech, they would say "That's not gonna work".
It remains to be seen how well that translates into more subscriptions, but I figure if I can share what I've learned to give value to others, it probably comes back to us somehow.
(My email is in my profile, if you don't want to share it quite as broadly as posting it here.)
