Feedburner Flux

I’ve written about the Feedburner Myth several times and it certainly seems to be a preoccupation of other bloggers too. Feedburner, in case you didn’t know, is a Google-owned tool for managing your website’s newsfeed.

Bloggers who use Feedburner can tweak their feeds and ensure that visitors clicking their orange (or any other color) RSS subscribe buttons will be presented with an easy to use subscription form. Instead of seeing XML code in the browser window, visitors are presented with an explanation of what they are looking at and a bunch of buttons that allow them to add the feed to their Google page, My Yahoo, Bloglines account or any of dozens of other feed readers.

It is the wide variety of feed reader software and systems that causes the bouncing feedcount (the supposed number of subscribers to a particular feed as reported by Feedburner).

Numbers fluctuate on a daily basis because of the way the system counts subscribers (at weekends people don’t tend to switch on their work machine from which they subscribed and on work days readers aren’t using the standalone news aggregator instaled on their home machines, for instance). There are other factors that cause the numbers to bounce, mainly glitches in any one of the feed aggregator sites, with Google, or with Feedburner itself.

It’s not proven, but my hunch is that people don’t ever actually unsubscribe from feeds, certainly not en masse overnight. There will be natural wastage as people uninstall reader software, or do a spring clean on their subscribed feeds. But, it would be far too much of a coincidence that several hundred subscribers would suddenly be turned off by your latest post and remove you from their feed list.

The feed counts for my two main blogs Sciencebase.com and Sciencetext.com have climbed steadily over the last year to eighteen months. When I first installed Feedburner for Sciencebase it accrued over 1000 readers in the first update (presumably all those people who had already subscribed, rather than mass enthusiasm. Today, it reports 3512 subscribers, which is almost as high as it’s ever been. But, yesterday it was telling me this time last week it was 200 fewer and the week before 50 higher. My gut feeling is that currently, Sciencebase currently has almost 3600 subscribers, or thereabouts and the peaks and troughs are down to changes in reader activity. Tomorrow, I just know it will be lower, people often finish work early on a Friday, or have extended lunch breaks or other activities and so are pinging the feeds less.

Feedburner provides some useful additional information to feedcount, breaking it down into the actual programs and systems with which readers have subscribed. You can see the main ones in the chart below.

There are some interesting features to this chart. If one assumes that major temporary drops are nothing more than software glitches on those systems, then some of the tools people use are flat-lining and at the time showing absolutely no growth (the dotted lines represent what I think is the true path of the subscriber numbers). Others were at the time creeping up ever so slightly (these are figures from earlier this year and there has been a lot more growth since). The “Other” and “Snarfer” lines are interesting. They are almost parallel and show a weekly cycle of rising and falling. Snarfer is a standalone news reader you download and install that has Sciencebase in its default list of science sites to which users can subscribe.

Wayne Smallman of tech blog BBT, suggests that the fact that the Other and Snarfer lines are so close to each other is an artefact of double counting. But, I’ve added up the individual items in the Other category and Snarfer and it does seem that these are genuine individual subscribers rather than duplicate entries in the feedcount. My own feeling is that the reason they are closely parallel (but with some timelag) is that Other is mainly comprised of yet more standalone readers and, as explained above, the use of standalones varies over the course of the week.