Jaokob Nielsen's most recent newsletter was about newsletter usability. His main findings are:

• The process of subscribing and unsubscribing is getting easier
• the average time spent “reading” a newsletter is 51 seconds
• the blah-blah text intro is skipped by more than two thirds of readers
• eye-tracking test show the most read parts are the first 2 words of each headline
• stored newsletters in inboxes become part of users' information spaces and thus will be found when they search their own environments

He also mentions RSS and suggest calling them “news feeds” as 82% have never heard of them. He concludes that feeds are a “cold medium”, and that they do not form the same relationships as newsletters. He also estimates newsletter subscribers generate 10 times as much revenue as feed subscribers.


newsletters: cut out the blah-blah text, no one reads it!

One last word about newlsetters not in Jakob's highly informative piece: “open rates” (the percentage of people who open the newsletter they receive in their inbox) are going down according to this ExactTarget study (registration required):
email open rates were 35.5% in 2005, down 16.5% from 2004.

The good news is that click-through rates (percenage of readers who click on a link in the newsletter) remained unchanged at around 6.6%. There's just fewer of them.

Still, Jakob maintains that newsletters are the “best way to maintain customer relationships” and as usual I tend to agree with him.

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Google continues to gain market share over the other Search Engines. Here are the latest stats from a May 22 Comscore press release:
Total Internet Searches (April 2005) April 2006:

Google Sites (36.5%) 43.1%

Yahoo! Sites (30.7%) 28.0%

MSN Sites (16.1%) 13.2%

AOL- Time W (9.0%) 6.9%

Ask Network (6.1%) 5.8%

You can see the trend is positive for Google. On top of that, those numbers underplay Google's dominance:

• Google powers AOL Search, so you can add almost 7% to its market share right there bringing it to 50%
• Search Engine market share is based on the number of searches made (for example, Google served 2.9 billion searches in May vs. Yahoo's 1.9 billion). This is different from referral traffic from Search Engines, where Google ranks above 60%)
• Google Pay Per Click market share for AdWords is greater than 70%
• In most other countries other than the USA (with the notable exception of China), Google has a much bigger market share

So the mantra goes thus: if you optimize or advertise, do it with Google and you will rise