The Subscriber Count
Posted by Davy Brion on April 3rd, 2009
After the subscriber count (as reported by Feedburner) dropped to 325 today instead of the usual average of slightly above 900, some people started asking me “what’s up with the low subscriber count all of the sudden?”
Well, here’s the deal… in the beginning of this blog, there was just one feed (http://davybrion.com/blog/feed/) but after a while i switched to Feedburner. That introduced another URL to access the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/davybrion. Then another couple of months later, i migrated from a regular Feedburner account to a Google Feedburner account. For some reason, this introduced another 2 URLs: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/davybrion and http://feedproxy.google.com/davybrion. I really don’t understand why they need to add 2 more URL’s but i’m sure they have their reasons.
The cool thing about Feedburner is that it gives you an overview of how many people are following your RSS feed and what clients they’re using. For instance, when everything works alright it tells me that 630 people are using Google Reader to follow my feed. Which is the combined total of subscribers to my 4 feed URLs as reported by Google Reader. But for some reason, Google Feedburner sometimes doesn’t count all of the subscribers that are using Google Reader. Sometimes it just doesn’t count the subscribers of one of the feeds, and occasionally it simply doesn’t count any Google Reader subscribers at all. It’s usually fixed within a few days or sometimes even the next day.
So that’s pretty much why the subscriber count sometimes looks like it’s on a roller coaster ride. But why a company that is otherwise capable of indexing the entire internet and making it easy and fast to search is incapable of incrementing a simple counter with a total that one of its other products is reporting is far beyond my ability to comprehend though 
April 4th, 2009 at 2:45 am
I have seen so many people having similar kind of weird issues with FeedBurner including me. I think Google’s FeedBurner integration has been an epic failure according to the standard and quality that Google maintains. Another striking thing is that they have never publicly discussed about this issue. Sometimes FeedBurner acts like Vista (Sorry Microsoft)
April 4th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I do have to say that the problems with counting Google Reader’s subscribers is about the only issue i’ve ever had with Feedburner, outside of them creating 2 more URLs to the feed when converting the feedburner account to a google account. Other than that, the number of subscribers reported to be using other RSS readers seems to be stable and i’ve never noticed any weirdness in those numbers.
But yeah, the problems they’ve had with adding Google Reader’s numbers, and especially the number of times this issue has come up again after it’s been fixed for the umpteenth time is just mind boggling.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
You could use the MyBrand settings to move everybody to a unique address : http://feeds.davybrion.com/yourfeedburnerfeed
You would *almost* be immuned from there server name changes…