Are Your Numbers Dropping? Maybe Somebody Broke the Counter!

Hasn`t feedburner just created a buzz in the blogosphere tonight!

Thanks for putting my mind at ease there. I was getting concerned that people didn’t love me any more either. It didn’t occur to me that it could be an accounting error!

I’m sorry it was me, i didn’t mean to break it, honest :D

haha…anyway I can;t wait for it to be back.

I just checked mine and it was down 50% over yesterday as well. Scott

Weird glitch – nice catch. ..

I think it’s not reporting the people who subscribed using Google Reader. Since that’s a majority for most of our blogs, it has resulted in a big drop. I hope they fix it quickly…

It appears that Mark 45n5 might have something to do with it heh!

Although it has happened before so I wouldn’t worry about it.

Btw, thanks for dropping by and commenting on my blog – it’s nice to have the Caroline Middlebrook experience! Heh!

Well, hope Feedburner will take this matter seriously and make the necessary corrections.

Seems like its always happening. The number has been pretty much fluctuating all the time.

@Neil, Yeah I think I would have figured it out from all the other posts if I hadn’t checked it out myself first.

@Sean, Yup the drop has affected everybody in different ways so for those of us with smaller numbers it’s not obvious that it’s a technical error.

@Ruchir, Yes I’ve realised that now too, Most of my readers use Bloglines which is why the drop wasn’t quite as large for me. Apparently it’s happened before and been rectified in a day or two.

@YC, The Caroline Middlebrook experience?? Lol, you’ll need to elaborate on that!! Actually YC stay tuned for tomorrow’s post – you’ll see just why when you read it :p

@Shams, As Ruchir has said, it would appear to be a problem with Google and not Feedburner. Feedburner just pulls in stats from the various readers so it’s not their fault in this case.

@Jude, there is a natural fluctuation due to the way that Feedburner works. I read a post about that once – it was on ProBlogger I believe but basically it only registers a subscriber when a feed is requested so if somebody doesnt check their feeds on a certain day it looks like they ubsubscribed. So it’s normal to see a bit of fluctuation.

Hey Caroline,

I’ve also noticed the fluctuation in subscribers over the last couple of days. I was a bit concerned with the FB so I checked my link clicks and compared the two.

I looks like either a bunch of folks are clicking on the “subscribe to my rss feed” and then not following through, or FB isn’t picking them all up.

Another thing I noticed:

Last week, at about 11:45pm, I threw up a post on a different blog. I did the obligatory social bookmarking thing and the traffic started flowing in. Well, at 12am FB resets the stats for the day… it didn’t pick up any traffic for almost two hours after the reset.

From 12am to almost 2am it showed zero traffic and zero new subscribers, but the other stats trackers I have on the blog – Google Analytics and Statcounter – both showed nearly 400 uniques in that time frame. The FB stats never adjusted to reflect actual traffic numbers.

I’m thinking FB stats are somewhat suspect. But they sure are fun to watch… and a bit addictive, too.

Anyway, great blog you’ve got here. I’ve enjoyed reading through your post in the last few weeks. Take care,

Sean

Yeah, I saw a sharp dropoff yesterday. I noticed my Google feedfetcher numbers were dramatically smaller. Could that be the culprit?

FeedBurner just posted about the drop on their blog.

@Sean, I’ve just found that post about why the Feedburner numbers fluctuate:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/16/why-does-my-feedburner-subscriber-count-fluctuate/

And thanks for the heads up, about time they acknowledged the problem.

@Eric, Yep, right on the money.

I first noticed this on Copyblogger. I saw the counter was at 18k, and I haven’t seen it that low in a long time. I checked my own counter (down from about 1100 to around 500) and then ProBlogger, which had dropped about 2/5ths, as you’ve pointed out here.

Either everyone decided to give up reading blogs or feedburner are having technical difficulties. That’s the disadvantage of feedburner having a monopoly on feeds I guess!

Anyway, this isn’t as bad as the time my counter mysteriously dropped to 0…

I wouldn’t worry about it Caroline. It appears everyones is broken. Our blog subscriber numbers are down 80%. Doesn’t mean people are not still reading :)

Keep those blog posts coming and more podcasts, you have a lovely voice!

Yes, the feedburner numbers are out of your control. So if you give things that are out of your control too much attention, you’ll get stressed. And nothing will change in the real world. ;)

@Skellie, ahh but if it drops to zero you *know* that there’s a technical glitch! It wasn’t until I saw your counter that I figured something was up with mine.

@Dave, Yep the culprit (Google feedfetcher) has been identified now.

@Tomaz, very true, which is why I didn’t worry about it when I saw it.

It was a problem with Google Feedfetcher that reports to FeedBurner. FeedFetcher didn’t report stats for Saturday hence no one had any readers who used Google Reader on that day.

I blogged about it, I’m surprised you didn’t read about it :)

@RSS Newsniche – yes I did read about it, about 200 times after I wrote this post lol! I think I noticed the problem a lot earlier than most people. I should have put an update on the post I guess but it’s old news now :)

I want to believe that the Mr. Feedburner is the one to blame. I am new to bloggin and I personally do not have that many subscribers, but since I started using the feedburner I have seen it done some strange things,
I guess there is still some kinks that needs to be work out of it. But let us also consider the fact that it is a software that is trying to keep track of not only thousands but perhaps millions of bloggers, and RSS subscribers/un-subscribers RSS/Atoms daily traffic.

OMG..i was looking through my blog subscription and noticed that my subscribers count went from 30 to 12 in a week. i don’t know what happened but thank god i found this..pheeeew…now am releaved. Thanx