I’ve been using FeedBurner for about almost a year and a half now (if anyone’s counting, that’s since the first month that I’ve been writing here. and FeedBurner’s been managing my subscribers since then). I’ve been lucky to watch my subscriber count grow consistently — with one notable exception.
This site has hovered around 400 RSS subscribers for months now, which is to be expected I think, since I have sometimes had less time to post than I would like in the past several months. But in the past two months, my subscriber count was suddenly cut in half.
That’s right. One day I logged into FeedBurner, and there were now roughly 200 subscribers instead of 400. I chalked it up to something weird happening on FeedBurner’s end, and didn’t think much about it (I’m not as obsessed as I used to be with subscriber count, fortunately).
A month later, I logged in again, and found the subscriber count had stayed the same for the entire month: approximately 200. Had FeedBurner overestimated my subscriber count before? I had no way of knowing, but assumed that was the case.
I began to accept the fact that something had been miscalculated somewhere, and that I actually had 200 subscribers instead of 400. Strange, but not the end of the world.
So imagine my surprise when I logged in today and saw this (that number in the top right is 398, in case it’s looking a little squished for you like it does for me):
It would appear that I suddenly had 400 subscribers again, after months of having 200. So I clicked on the detailed listing of feed readers and aggregators to see where the other 200 had come from.
According to the FeedBurner stats, 164 Netvibes subscribers (apparently, 41% of my subscriber base) suddenly reappeared on the FeedBurner radar.
So my question is: what happened during those few months that Netvibes’ readers disappeared from my subscriber count? If anyone is subscribed to this site through Netvibes, have you noticed anything weird going on in the past 12 weeks?
Has anyone else had issues with FeedBurner stats being unreliable?
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April 18th, 2008 at 6:04 am
Lucas,
FeedBurner subscriber stats have been notirously unreliable. They fluctuate quite a bit sometimes, which I have definitely seen on my own sites.
But I haven’t seen a huge problem like you had. That is really weird. Although my stats have climbed up recently, and I have no idea why. I’m certainly not going to complain.
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:17 am
Thanks for your comment Andrew. It’s good to know someone else is having similar problems with the reliability of FeedBurner stats. Too bad FeedBurner can’t get this sorted out.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:54 am
My Sciencebase.com site has around 3000 subscribers, this figure can drop down and bounce back sometimes as low as 2000 day by day. This is nothing to do with people “unsubscribing” (who does that?) and is everything to do with the different feed clients and how they report to feedburner and how feedburner responds and counts their pings. I’ve written about the Feedburner myth previously.
db
April 30th, 2008 at 9:07 am
I have to agree David. I don’t think people are unsubscribing, but instead there are various readers out there that aren’t reporting their stats properly. I don’t think it’s so much of a FeedBurner problem as it is a Netvibes problem — they seem to either report a very high number of readers, or none at all.
Strangely, none of the other readers seem to have such serious problems with subscriber reporting as Netvibes. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:18 am
After a troubling couple of days, Sciencebase seems to have bounced back to the 3000-mark. Incidentally, one of the worst culprits previously was not Netvibes but Google for failing to report pings properly. Of course, anyone who users a hard-software application like Snarfer, but only does so at weekends on a home PC, say, will only report on those days. It seems that aspect of Feedburner reporting is the underlying cause of bouncing subscriber numbers for most sites.
db
May 5th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
That’s an interesting point David, that hadn’t really occurred to me. I suppose if the application is not fetching the feed (i.e. you don’t open a client-side RSS fetching app all the time) it will only report when it’s going to fetch the feed.
Also interesting that Google was posing a problem for you. I hadn’t had any problems with Google, but Netvies is consistently problematic. In the past few days however, this site has moved above the 400-subscriber mark again. It would seem things are (for now) resolved.
May 6th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Yeah, there were a couple of major Google reader outages, maybe six months ago, or thereabouts, they were widely discussed at the time, I did see big dives at that time, but bounced back within 3-4 days.
Meanwhile, my Sunday figure was much higher than usual, so I’m anticipating a hike up to around 3100 when I see the count for yesterday.
db
May 13th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Interesting to know David. Thanks for the update.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Currently, 3045. But, I also hear from others that there sites have increased in similar proportion so there may have been an update to the counting algo at Feedburner.
Another point that’s been raised elsewhere is that subscriber numbers can rise even when one isn’t actually posting to a blog, it makes one wonder how many of those 3045 are actually subscribing to read or are just readers who came once and have never been back
db
May 14th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
If I compare my subscriber stats with my click through stats, I can definitely see that while I may have several hundred subscribers, the most who will actually click through to a post is around 40. That’s a good indication that what you’ve said about the ‘one-time subscribers’ actually being the case.
I also took a look back through my historical FeedBurner stats, and noticed that for around a week (about a year ago) I had 1500 subscribers. This number was obviously inaccurate.
Fortunately, things seem to be back to (relatively) normal, with my subscriber count being between 400 and 450.
May 31st, 2008 at 3:21 pm
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