Feedburner Up's and Down's

[Mac100x]

Hi everyone!, I wanted to talk to you about the Google program Feedburner which allows others to subscribe to your blog. One issue I am having and I don't know if other people are having this is that my number of readers are going up and down. Sometimes it's 12 readers, sometimes 35, or down to like 11 readers. It happens to change everyday! I don't understand the pattern is something wrong in their system calculations or are people subscribing and then un-subscribing? I would appreciate if someone could explain me this.

Thank you,

[ChickenFreak]

Isn't Feedburner "pull" and not "push"? That is, I assume that someone would have to open their feed reader to get the feed, and people may not be doing that every day. That would produce your varying numbers.

However, I may have that totally wrong.

[Diagonalspoon]

It happens to me Mac too some days I will have 16 and other like 21 then 16 again I dont know what it is though

[Mac100x]

Ya Diagonalspoon if someone had the answer that would really be helpful!

[Mac100x]

@ChickenFreak- You might be about right... But as I see other forums it seems others have the same issue. But why make it when somebody opens your feed? Why not just keep it to people who have simply subscribed, like on YouTube? Or another example could be followers! The number of followers doesn't usually change everyday dramatically.

[ChickenFreak]

Well, it is what it is RSS is a pull technology, and pull technologies only transfer data when the client asks for it. It's essentially the same thing as web browsing - you can have X pageviews one day and 3X pageviews another day, just because on one day more visitors chose to come to your site. Similarly, on one day more people decided to look at your RSS feed.

[erik]

Actually, I think the behavior you're describing is what makes Feedburner so valuable.

Feedburner's really lousy in explaining how they calculate subscriber numbers, but here's how I understand it. Anytime somebody subscribes by email and confirms their subscription, your subscriber count goes up by one. I assume that subscriber gets counted each day forever, unless he unsubscribes or emails to him start bouncing (meaning he's canceled the email account through which he's subscribed).

As for RSS subscriptions, I think subscribers only get counted on days they ping your feed. This, also, is how it should be. Say, for instance, I subscribe to your feed through my feed reader, and open my feed reader every day for the next month. Each day I've opened my feedreader, and your feed gets hit, counts me as a subscriber for that day.

But say I get run over by a bus next month. You'll get no more feed hits from me, and I will cease to count as a subscriber—just the same as if I unsubscribed.

Or, say I leave the country for a year and stop reading my feeds. I won't count as a subscriber any day that year. But the day I return and start using my feed reader again, I'll start getting counted once again as a subscriber. And that's just the behavior your want, in terms of having accurate feed statistics.

[Mac100x]

Oh, Thanks for the clear and conscience explanation erik! It makes sense now! Thank you!

[WhoJayBe]

It's not just Feedburner, it's actually any RSS Feed counter and these numbers will fluctuate up and down all the time. I believe it all depends on what's being pulled off your feeds for the prior day. For instance, subscribers aren't the only ones pulling at your feeds... blog directories you submit them to, automated blogs using that plugin to get your feeds to display on their blog, etc.

On top of that, it all depends on how people subscribed and what's being reported. For instance, I have a lot of e-mail subscribers and once in a while Google Feedburner won't show my Google subscribers so that number is dropped drastically.

Just login to your Feedburner account and it'll show you a break down on how people subscribed and then compare it to the next time your feed count drops/goes up.

I hope I made some kind of sense lol

[technicalbuzz]

I have noticed the same thing and I thought it was just me .... I think it is just that the almighty google does what it wants to do. If it says that you only have 21 subscribers when you had 53 the day before, so be it, google has spoken...