Fixing Feedburner Counts

Is the RSS feedcount for your blog up again today? Mine is. Over on Sciencebase.com it was at an all-time high of 3202 and today it’s reading 3214. This is quite odd given that on Saturday it was reporting as half that figure. It’s not as if the site could have lost 1500 readers and gained a new 1500 readers (see The Feedburner Myth for more on that).

In fact, I reckon what’s happening is that Feedburner/Google are fixing bugs in the reporting process and ensuring that Google Reader and iGoogle, which are notoriously fickle, are reporting back to Feedburner HQ properly and consistently now. Moreover, as Google is starting to fold blogs under their new feeds system it will presumably phase out the legacy Feedburner system itself and we will all most likely get a new feedcount stats system in the near future hooked to our Google account instead (there will possibly be benefits of their folding Feedburner into Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools in the process).

These changes all seem to coincide with Adsense for Feeds being enabled (you can already add ads via FB with Feedflare, but you have to switch to a Google account login (rather than a Feedburner login) to take advantage of the newer version of Adsense for feeds.

In case you’re wondering the Sciencetext feed is good on 251 which is also an all-time high and is again a gain on yesterday’s high. Even Sciscoop.com is up at 745 (it’s been hovering around 650 for weeks).

It occurred to me while musing on all this, that a site’s real number of RSS subscribers probably doesn’t change that much at all (unless you have less than 100), it is probably always higher than the figure reported by Feedburner, give or take a couple of dozen. I’ve got a hunch that counts will continue to climb this week as Feedburner and Google fix the glitches and bugs in their system and make things more consistent. tomorrow I’ll be covering some chilling thoughts from Iceland about the commercial prospects for newsfeeds.

Do let me know, via the comments, what your site’s count is and how it’s fluctuating this week so that we can compare notes.