do subscribers get updated when …

Sort of! If your readers use RSS and subscribe to your RSS feed, they are automatically updated (they’ll see new posts in their RSS reader, or Firefox toolbar).

There is a plugin you can use, where people can subscribe for updates by email.

As Dgold mentioned, ideally folks will subscribe to your RSS feeds to learn about new posts.

If you have some folks who don’t quite “get” that whole RSS thingy, you might look at https://www.feedblitz.com/ as well.

I think we’ve ALL got some readers who probably don’t “get” RSS yet (Okay, I don’t really get it either, I use it a little such as live-bookmarks in Firefox and “web clips” in Gmail, which is under Settings > Web Clips, try putting your own RSS feed there if you use Gmail). What % are using a newsreader app separately, other than Google Homepage and that sort of thing?

RSS is not that widespread in USA yet, though it is getting more common.

?? True, adopting it is a bit slow, but folks really are getting the hang of it. I use FeedBurner to make acquiring stats a bit easier. I also use Google Analytics for web stats and can get a “total visitors” number (kinda) with both together.

Combining those, I see that 25% of my visitors are via the RSS feeds. Now, I don’t (yet) have a way to figure out how many of those “become” part of the 75% web visitors. But soon…

So, of those 25%, here’s how they “consume” feeds:

Google Desktop – 40% (this always surprises me!)
Live Journal – 6%
BlogLines – 6%
BlogBridge – 6%
“Other Readers” – 29% (I think these include Firefox, IE7, and more traditional ones)
Java based reader – 6%
Unknown – 6%

And I have 2 on FeedBlitz getting the emails. ??