Rok: When you decided to drop e-mail publishing, what exactly were your steps, especially in terms of communicating this with you existing e-mail list? What response did you get? Can you give us any advice on how to best "convert"?

John: The first step in converting to direct-to-desktop publishing was getting my channel set up and adding what I wanted to the archives. I had been blogging for a bit before the switch using a script called Greymatter.

I took my Q channel live on the 1st of September of 2003. I had already sent several notices to my email list about the change. When I stopped doing discrete issues of the Daily and went blog, about May or June of 2003, all I would send my email list was a short weekly reminder to go read it. So they were already prepared somewhat for having to go on the Internet to read it. I never did keep very good track of the stats at that time, which I regret, so I have no real idea how many people were actually reading the Daily during that time period.

I think I gave everybody about 2 weeks to switch over after the first announcement. I did send several reminders during that time. Since I was one of the first Q publishers to go live, this was probably one of the reasons I had such a poor conversion ratio. People just did not know what to make of it or maybe they thought I was joking.

When I cleaned out my list the last time, right before the last announcement, I had a little over 1000 email addresses on the list. Less than 20 switched over. Besides the reasons above, there are several reasons for such a low rate. The most probable one, supported by lots of statistical data as well as conversations with other email publishers who were doing resubscribes at the time to make sure their lists were compliant with Federal and state regulations, is that, on the average, less that 10 per cent of the email addresses on an ezine list are addresses where someone actually reads the messages. This is especially true of lists that were built in part by using the free subscribers provided by the advertising co-ops.

Other publishers who switched to Q after I did have had similar responses. That tends to support my theory about the uselessness of email lists, but there are always exceptions to any rule. I suppose there are a few small publishers out there with high quality lists. I know you claim yours is.

BTW, I did read your "statistical" analysis of your list that you published. We need to talk, Rok, about that article. You make some very contradictory statements in that analysis and that calls your whole argument into question.

My advice to someone planning on switching is do a thorough preparation of your list for this. If I had it to do over, I would have given them a bit more time and would probably have made a better argument to convince them of how serious I was about this.

But I recommend, and I did this the first time and would do it again, is draw a FIRM line in the sand. Give them a deadline and stick to it. Also, don't expect much over 10 per cent to switch. If they do, congratulate yourself for having a terrific list, If you don't, you won't be so disappointed.