With the RSS competition between John Chow and Shoemoney nearing completion, now is a good time for my take on the situation. While I pretty much agree with Derek’s take on the situation, there are a few other aspects of it that I have noticed as well.

One way that it can be looked at is that because John is going to win the competition, it would show that Shoemoney’s readers are more likely to check out other blogs and subscribe to their feeds. I say this because due to the coverage that they have both given to this competition, they have been promoting not only their own feeds, but each other’s as well.

Another way that this could be viewed is that based on the subscription numbers, those people who are viewing these sites for the first time finds John’s to be more informative, useful, or maybe just more entertaining and the type of blog they would be more interested in continuing to read.

The third aspect that I would like to note is that people (myself included) will do just about anything asked of them to win a cool prize. I include myself because before the competition started, I had no desire to sign up for any blog’s feed via email. I generally visit the sites in my browser and do use a feed reader on a regular basis, but really have no read to receive extra emails containing information I am already going to get. However, the chance at winning some of the prizes that these guys have been giving away was enough to get me to sign-up for the feed via email.

I suspect there are many people like me who will be unsubscribing to the email feed once the supply of prizes has been depleted. This remains to be seen, however, as there are still prizes left to be had.