If you are in the Blogosphere you have probably heard (and most likely also use) Feedburner – The most popular RSS feed provider. This RSS managing system from Google allows your visitors to stay in touch with your blog through the RSS feeds. In other words your readers are updated on every article immediately without the need of checking your blog all the time. I like Feedburner. It is simply because it is easy to use, gives nice number of different options to subscribe to your feeds and it provides you also with handy statistics about your RSS subscribers.
Talking about the stats, I am sure many of you have already experienced that great feeling of accomplishment when the number of your feed readers is climbing up. You feel that your blog is going the right way and all that hard work is slowly paying off. On the other hand the feeling of “despair” when this number suddenly drops down without any particular reason might discourage many new bloggers.
“How come that the number of my feed subscribers dropped that much over the night?? Is it because my last article was just a piece of crap?” Questions like this were bugging my mind quite a lot in the past.
So, I decided to get to the root of this problem and find out why is this fluctuation in the number of Feedburner subscribers happening. After some research I found out I am not the only one with this problem…many people were reporting this issue. So, what is going on here?
After all I found the answer…but before I will be talking about the reason of this fluctuation let’s have a look at the small infographic below. It shows how Feedburner count the number of your RSS feed readers.
So, why the number of mine (and yours) Feedburner subscribers goes up and down?
First of all there is nothing wrong with the Feedburner. As you can see at the picture above there are two main types of feed readers: Web-based and Stand-alone feed readers.
Their purpose is the same, to deliver you the RSS feeds of blogs you are interested in, but the way they do it is different. While web-based feed readers such as Google Reader, My Yahoo fetch feeds every 24 hours no matter if you log in to your feed reader or not.
Stand-alone feed readers such as Feed Reader3 or AmphetaDesk fetch feeds only on the user’s request. This means, if person would not request the feeds yesterday Feedburner would remove this person from the list of your feed subscribers. If this person would request the feeds the next day again…Voila! Feedburner would count this person to the list again. And that is the main reason of all that fluctuation.
How to solve this?
Well, I have no special advice how to avoid these sudden ups and downs in the total number of your RSS subscribers you just have to get used to it. The only advice I could give is to stay calm and don’t take it too seriously. This fluctuation does not have to reflect the real number of your RSS readers so before you start to panic try to recheck it in couple of days.
My questions for you
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Have you noticed the fluctuation of your Feadburner subscribers as well?
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I had that same reaction you mentioned in this article… I thought I was loosing subscribers but after a while I figured out that it can’t be that. That there has to be something else that makes the subscribers count drop now and then.
Thanks for this article, it confirmed my thesis.