It is quite a bit to get from a landing page, but I think that's the point. If something can get 5000 people on a mailing list in 1 day then it shows that there's a strong interest in the idea, so it's worth investing time in developing it further.
Yeah, but it can't get that many. Not for a landing page.
Being #1 on HN for a few hours will bring you 20 to 30k views (cumulative with getting up and drifting back down). The reddit frontpage frontpage will get you the amount of views you need, but you're not getting there, I can almost promise you that.
Views are not email addresses. Worse, views are not real people expressing real interesting (e.g. would pay or be willing to change their habits) in your product. Views are a pretty meaningless indicator, overall.
I think the point was the parent post was saying you'd need 100k views w/ a 5% conversion which would be challenging. Evbn was saying reddit could get the 100k views.
I think you are completely correct. I think @evbn is, well, not wrong, because you can get the 100k views. I just don't think those views are going to net your (incredibly high) 5% conversion. The value of a view from a bored redditor is generally less than the value of a well-earned, targetted view.
Websites specific to the niche you're targetting or well known sites in the native language of the target audience. Perhaps Twitter or more closed communities like Something Awful.
A conversion rate of 5% is pretty respectable, that means the landing page needs to be seen by 100k people to collect 5000 emails.
That's quite a bit for having nothing more than a landing page to offer, I can see that happening for a MVP, but not for just a landing page.