For those of you who track numbers, you may be curious to know why I have such signficant swings in the number of subscribers to this blog. Well, it appears that there’s a problem that either Bloglines (used to read blogs) and/or FeedBurner (used to track blog readers) need to fix. For some reason, about 100 of my Bloglines subscribers get left out of the FeedBurner subscriber counts every so often. So, as an example, today FeedBurner is reporting 574 subscribers when in reality it should be around 674 subscribers.
Aside from this issue, the subscriber number should fluctuate from day to day because some blog readers (for example those using Firefox Live) only get counted when they actually access my posts. I don’t know which company is responsible for this issue, but hopefully one or both of them will look into it and get it fixed. Anyone else experiencing a similar issue?
Hi Tony -
I’ve noticed the same thing on my blog; there have been some intermittent polling gaps coming from Bloglines over the last few weeks. We’ve reached out to them to find out what’s causing these lags, hopefully we’ll have an answer soon.
As you can imagine, we can only include the numbers for hits that we see… if a web-based aggregator doesn’t poll for one of the aliases for your feed (and consequently doesn’t tell us how many subscribers they have on that feed) there’s no way for us to include it in our nightly roll-up.
–Rick
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
Maybe that explains why my Feedburner number is stuck at 0!
Ha
Aaron – Are you redirecting traffic to your feed? Feel free to send a note into feedback@feedburner.com with any specific issues, we’ll be happy to take a look.
–Rick
I see your readership is over 700 now. My number has never been that high, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Feedburner or Bloglines.
Mark, you need to understand, though, that I don’t get paid any royalties for my blog subscribers like you do when people purchase your best-selling book.
tony
Rick, in case you’re still following this conversation, I figured out with the gap in reporting occurs. Whenever I don’t post anything in a 24-hour period, the Bloglines subscriber numbers get dropped. Hopefully that helps FeedBurner and/or Bloglines correct the problem.
tony
Tony – Thanks! I continue to see erratic polling results from them, this is a useful data point. I’ll let you know what we find out…
–Rick