Subscribers vs followers, and exporting email addresses

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  chrisltpainter · Member · Mar 3, 2024 at 1:26 am

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  Hi, there.

  I currently have a self-hosted WordPress site (without Jetpack), but I’m considering the possibility of moving back to WordPress.com. There’s something I’d like to clarify first, though.

  There was a time when people could follow a WordPress blog in two ways:

  • If they had a WordPress.com account, they could click the Follow button on the site and would be added to a list called Followers. The list of these followers could not be exported from the site because it did not have email addresses associated with it.
  • If they didn’t have a WordPress.com account, they could enter their email address and would be added to a list called Email followers. This list could be exported from the site because it had email addresses associated with it.

  Now, looking at the Support site, perhaps since your Newsletter feature was released, both of these seem to fall under what is called “Subscribers“. The article I’ve linked to also makes it sound like all subscribers, whether they have a WordPress.com account or not, have an associated email address which can be exported in a CSV. Can you confirm that that is the case? 

  The main reason I stopped using WordPress.com was because I was mostly getting “Followers”, which I couldn’t export to another platform (unless it was self-hosted WordPress with Jetpack, which I didn’t want to do).

  It’s important to me that I can export the email addresses of all of my followers/subscribers should I want to move to another platform.

  Cheers,
  Chris.