The Feedburner Myth

If you’re a blogger like me, do you find yourself waiting patiently each morning to see your Feedburner count chicklet update? If it’s a good day, you’ll see a little jump that offers a cheap thrill, if it’s not such a good day, there will be a drop that will sadden your heart for the rest of the day. But, did you ever stop to think how much of slave to this silly little number you have become? I did and I’ve decided it has to stop.

Feedburner count seems to bob up and down like a, well, I-don’t-know-what. It’s never stable, it varies day-by-day, sometimes there will be huge spikes, sometimes there will be big drops. What one would expect for a passive subscription service is a fairly steady increase as a site grows, not all this sinusoidal activity. However, you can take solace in the fact that most of these ups and downs do not reflect real changes in your subscriber numbers but are simply down to glitches, bugs, and the way people access their feeds depending on the day of the week.

Picture this. I find a fascinating site. Read a couple of posts think, “Hey, this is good stuff”, click the orange and add the site’s RSS feed to my newsreader. You can add the Sig Figs feed to Google Reader, right now, for instance). So, from now on I get regular RSS updates for that site, read stuff that I find interesting, and basically forget about it. It happens everyday for thousands upon thousands, if not millions of feeds.

However, occasionally the Google Reader servers fail to report their pings to Feedburner. So, maybe that site I visited had 23 subscribers from Google Reader among 112 total subscribers. Next day when the site owner checks their feedcount, they find they’re down 23 to 89. Sad day. Then, overnight the Google glitch is fixed, numbers are reported again and the feedcount is back up and has maybe gained a couple of new Google readers into the bargain, so the count is 114. Happy day.

Google Reader miscounts are not the only problem. A recent reporting bug for the Feedblitz RSS to email service had sites with a few dozen or a few hundred subscribers suddenly reporting leaps to several thousand. Happy day? Not really, after a few hours the blogosphere learned of the bug and all those who thought they had passed some kind of subscriber tipping point were back down to earth after a few days once the bug was fixed.

Another problem is the types of news readers your subscribers are using. My Sciencebase science news site is listed in the default feeds offered to users of the Snarfer news aggregator program for instance. As such, the site has gained a not insignificant number of subscribers who choose to add the Sciencebase feed that way. However, the variation in how people use this kind of program day to day and more specifically at weekends or holidays as opposed to working days varies considerably.

The subscriber numbers reported by standalone (offline) feed readers can run hot and cold depending on the day of the week. If it’s a program users install on home machines then numbers will be higher at weekends, because that’s when they’re most likely to use their home machine. In contrast, online readers, such as Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo! tend to be used more frequently during the working week and so subscriber numbers for these systems add more to the total count on weekdays because users cannot install or use a standalone reader on a work or school machine.

Of course, there is some natural attrition. Some people do remove feeds from their lists. However, I have well over 250 feeds in Google Reader alone, and I know other journalists who have thousands. There is simply no time to worry about deleting feeds one may have outgrown or that have stagnated, you simply ignore the headlines from anything that doesn’t appeal and read the decent stuff.

As such, your Feedburner count may bob up and down like the proverbial “i-don’t-know-what” over the course of days depending on feed aggregator usage, reporting errors, and other vagaries. It’s one of the reasons I don’t display the Feedburner chicklet on this site. You can reveal the Feedburner count of many sites even if they don’t choose to display it.

Anyway, as long as your site itself is active and growing and adding great new content on a regular basis, you should see a general upward trend in feedcount, but there’s no real need to check the count every day is there?