MORE Problems With FeedBurner
Seems FeedBurner have had some problems with my feed for the last couple of days. Wednesday shows 1,422 subscribers, Thursday that drops to 982, but Friday has 1,089.
Digging into the stats it looks like the first drop was because email subscribers were not counted. Friday appears to be Google under reporting by 320 readers.
Question is, am I somehow doing something wrong or is this a problem that will solve itself? I haven’t changed anything, the same Wordpress FeedBurner plugin as was being used earlier in the week. The only change is I signed up for FeedBurner feed advertising but no ads are currently showing.
This is the problem with FeedBurner having a monopoly on feed stats, it is a brilliant service (when it works) but we have nothing to compare it against when things go wobbly 
Any ideas?
Tags: blogging, feedburner, problems, news, tips
Posted on March 24th, 2007 by Chris Garrett in News
I’ve been having a similar issue, although not as drastic (as my subscriber numbers are merely a fraction–small fraction–of yours) as the numbers you exhibit. While I love Feedburner, I wish they would be a little more consistent.
Are you a paying customer? Or using the free service?
I’ve been having big fluctuations the last couple days as well, as has this blogger:
http://kumikosuzuki.blogspot.com/2007/03/filtering-my-readership.html
Apparently FeedBurner’s email subscriptions are acting up too.
Measuring feed statistics is a tricky business. The FeedBurner blog gives a lot of insight into the problems inherent to these metrics.
I tend to use their daily subscriber numbers to get a sense for overall growth trends rather than to get an “accurate” daily number.
The weekends always have a dip in it since many people don’t turn on their computers, but such erratic behavior in the middle of the week is a bit odd.
You’re right, though. It would be nice to have an alternative to use as a point of comparison.
Hey Chris! I fear my comment over here is long overdue. I should have introduced myself long ago!
Anyway, head over to the FeedBurner forums and poke around. If you can’t find an answer to your question, start a new thread - they are astonishingly prompt and will get back to you right away.
Good luck!
My numbers bounce up and down a couple percent any given day. My problem: at times, the Feedburner script on my page is slow loading; sometimes longer than a minute. Because the FB button is high up on my sidebar, the rest of the items won’t load until FB does.
I have seen this roller coaster ride too. When I asked Feedburner, I was told that it was Feedblitz that wasn’t reporting all my subscribers. I was considering moving to Feedburner for my email subscribers as well, but after your post, I am going to wait and see how it is resolved.
Seshu
Chris, I don’t know if you’ve read this article over at the FeedBurner blog, but it at least offers some explanation as to why the feed numbers fluctuate. From what I’ve seen, you’re not the only one that experiences it. Several blogs I visit that normally have more than 1000 subscribers often drop into the high hundreds from time to time.
I’m concerned about all the feeds being managed by Feedburner. Suppose they go out of business one day, how would we be able to recover the feeds people have subscribed to?
@Stephen - am on the free service
@Garrett, @Lars-Christian - good to know it’s not just me!
@Jason/@Philip - yeah we looked at doing it when we developed performancing metrics but it just seemed so fraught with problems we focused on what we could do well. Am glad we didn’t do it now. Can you imaging how bad it would have been had the service closed and people lost subscribers? The only solution is to use both feeds and email subscription, take regular copies of your email subscriber list and use a redirect (eg. wordpress feedburner plugin) rather than link to feedburner direct. As you will see, I link to feedburner but the discovery address uses the plugin. I’m hoping feedburner stays in business!
@Wendy - I will see in the week if the results improve, I did look over the threads as you suggest and there have been issues
@Ian - yeah, having JS widget is a pain when there are delays
@Seshu - I noticed people are saying feedblitz and Google are misreporting
Okay, now I know I’m not the only one seeing inconsistent numbers using FeedBurner and the recent drop in my readership count. Unlike most of you I don’t have a huge readership since mine is a personal type blog rather than having one road in which it travels but the drop is there nonetheless.
It’s funny that you mentioned the old Performancing Metrics, Chris, since I just registered with the new Performancing Metrics this morning and am going to use the new pmetrics system to bounce against feedBurner. I’ll be interested to know how the new system works out.
BTW, I also use the FeedBurner Redirect plugin rather than directly burning my feeds. FeedBurner has gone down several times in the past couple of months and my feeds have always reverted back to their normal format.
Just to make clear here…
I’m using the new Performancing metrics to bounce my
site stats against FeedBurner’s site stats. I believe pmetrics is site stats only. Sorry if there was any misinterpretation.
Certainly I think it was Thursday the feed counter didn’t relate to the numbers inside the interface, though now the numbers represent what was on the counter.
Also if someone links through to you, e.g. Robert Scoble, that can actually cause the numbers to go up based on links from their feed.
I just look at it like any stat - it varies a lot, but I think any reader can tell that Techcrunch have a few more readers than my blog, and I have maybe a few more readers than many new bloggers (though my blog is fairly new)
The last time I encountered this with my previous domain, I wrote to them. The reply, as I understand from it, has to do with their daily reporting.
Feedburner subscriber numbers only get updated once every 24 hours depending on the number of people who reads your post in their feed reader.
Since not everyone will read your feed in the same 24 hour period, those numbers thus report those who did.
This is at most times the reason why the numbers in feedcount is always flucuating.
Looks like these ups, downs and bumps are something we have to live with, thanks guys
That’s been my experience, too, Chris. One thing I’ve noticed is that when I don’t post, more often than not, my stats decrease. For instance, there are many weekends I don’t post. So by Monday morning, I can somethings loose a significant number of ’subscribers.’ I just assume they’re bots from directories and search engines that grow as I post more and then drop off when I post less.
Yeah, my numbers were swinging up and down this weekend, too.
I was praising God that they jumped up, now they dipped a bit, but I pray they even out and grow, grow, grow!
let me know if this helps
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/manage-feed-count-fluctuations/