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This was a post we wrote up in follow up to this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488170

Gives our personal account to why email lists are so valuable and some of the metrics we collect to track this.

Good stuff! May I ask what your open-rate is? The trend I've seen at a few places I've worked at is that Facebook has become the dominant traffic driver (Twitter in 2nd) for bringing people back to the site. Lot of factors behind this (demographics, ad teams abusing email lists over the years, etc), but I'd pretty much written off email since I know so many of our addresses are people's middle school Hotmail accounts (which I'd remove, but the ad team wants to claim they're sending to X-thousand people). Glad to hear it's working for you. Subscribing now!

Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.

We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.

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