It looks like my previous post caused Robert Scoble to go on a rant with Not enough RSS subscribers, Drazen says.

Judging by the first few sentences, I'd say Robert either read my post in a hurry or read it only partially. No reason for that - my feed is full text and should fit his taste. OK, let's see... (the text in italics is Robert's, the rest is mine)

 Ahh, ye olde “where’s the ROI?” argument, only in new clothes.

Indeed, yes - but this is not my stance. The ROI argument will come up from marketing and only hard numbers will help them decide. What I am asking is (at the very bottom of the post) that all bloggers help spread the word more so that common folk start using RSS the same way they use email today.

 Let’s study the problem. Let’s say we surveyed 1,000 people. Let’s say that only 3% read RSS feeds. So, that’s 30 people, right?

Not many, right? Well, here we go.

Of those 30 people, I’d bet 25 also have a blog of their own. We call those “influencers.”

I have a feed, but I am far from influencer. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people like me. But maybe you think most of your readers are influencers?

Anyway, let’s say that each of those people have 1,000 blog readers. Now, that’s not uncommon. I know a few people who read my blog who have 250,000 readers A DAY on their blogs.

So, that’s 25,000 people.

Not really :) Even though I have a university math degree I do not need it to see that you are assuming a lot. In order to multiply the numbers you'd have to assume that each of your readers have 1000 distinct readers. And that these 25000 people are somehow special (except from being tech savvy they might be completely average for all we know).

So let's turn things around. What if 500 out of your 1000 readers have blogs. But what if these readers and their readers subscribe to the same 100 blogs or so, plus a few (literally) distinct readers for each of them? That would be just a few thousand of people. What if we (bloggers) are all in a big echo chamber?

Oh, and remember who reads me? Walt Mossberg. So, is that one reader or millions? Don’t know who he is? You should do your homework.

I know who Walt Mossberg is. That is still one reader. He isn't some kind of magical spokesman for you. If he does mention you it will greatly increase your visibility, just like your link to me greatly increased my visibility. But that's all. If my blog is not interesting to people (and it won't be unless they are software developers) they will read the post you pointed to and leave.

Another way to look at it? [...]

A year ago Buzz was in a major USA national newspaper. I won’t name it here, but it has millions of circulation. He had somewhere around 50 downloads. When I linked to his product? He had 400.

So, go ahead and tell me that the blog/RSS audience doesn’t matter.

Wrong conclusion, on two accounts. First of all, people that still buy paper newspapers are most likely not potential customers for Buzz. Your readers on the other hand are most likely perfect potential customers. So the numbers can't be compared. Second, I did not say that RSS does not matter. Far from it. I use it as a consumer (almost all the content that comes to me is in the shape of RSS) and as a "publisher" through this blog. The point is that RSS audience is not big enough yet and we must all work so that it grows to an order of magnitude more readers.

[...]  Go ahead. I dare you.

You should never say something like this to a Serb :), we always accept the challenge even when there's no way we can win ;) Joke aside, let's do something more concrete.

Robert, you are undoubtedly popular blogger. I will repeat it again - your old feed has 18 thousand readers (on NewsGator). Surely you should be able to influence these people if just a bit. Here's what I'd like you to do - kindly ask your readers to send me their blogrolls (as OPML or links to OPML) to weblog at drazen.dotlic.name (email slightly obfuscated to protect from the spammers) with a subject "blogroll challenge". If they are using NewsGator that should be very easy to do.

I will write a utility that will process the blogrolls and present the stats for everyone. Then we can continue this discussion. OK?