The Death Of e-Mail Mailing Lists
Nov 16th, 2007 by Tim Skipper
Back in the early 90s, e-mail mailing lists were all the rage. You could subscribe to a list on just about any subject you could think of and receive e-mails individually, or in batches commonly known as digest format.
At the time I was making some money selling a small Windows 3.11 utility that monitored Windows resources and freed up memory, and I became interested in the Shareware marketing strategy. The Usenet newsgroups on the subject were all very US based, and so I decided to start a Shareware mailing list with a European slant. Euro-Share, The European Shareware Mailing List was born.
Over the next few years Euro-Share grew in popularity and influence. It had several thousand subscribers and I was annually making a five figure sum just from advertising revenue it created. I had joined the Board of the Association of Shareware Professionals and in 1999 I was invited to speak at the prestigious Shareware Industry Conference, in Tampa, Florida and had a wonderful 10 days in Miami, the Florida Keys and driving round the coast to Tampa for the 3 day conference.
But then people started to lose interest in mailing lists. The World Wide Web began to take off in a way nobody expected. Even Usenet began to move away from being a geeky newsreader based resource into a friendlier web based format, when Google bought out DejaNews in 2001 and created Google Groups.
The advertising revenue from Euro-Shared dropped sharply, and with my own business growing I couldn’t devote so much time to it as I used to. Eventually Euro-Share as an active e-mail mailing list fizzled out. I expect it’s much the same story with other mailing lists.
Nowadays, Blogging and RSS feeds are where it’s at. The distribution of people’s ideas thoughts and opinions has moved away from the push-medium of e-mail to the pull medium of the World Wide Web and RSS. This is no bad thing, but I lament the loss of the good old days of e-mail mailing lists all the same.
