February 01, 2007
The Numbers - They Go Down, They Go Up
The best way to describe feed subscription trends is that they are feisty. Some days your numbers are up, some days (like weekends), they can dip down. This is all normal behavior (read more about why feeds behave the way they do in our TechCrunch case study). But sometimes, other things can happen that result in erratic behavior and we do our best to communicate to you in these instances.
In the last couple days, some of you may have noticed a bump in your subscription numbers, and others of you may notice this bump in the coming days. Why, praytell? MyYahoo!, the oh-so-popular web-based feed-reader (hyphen-mania!), is again reporting subscription numbers. Neat. (You can catch up on the full story here). While we celebrate the closing of another forum thread, we hope some of you are pleased to see your subscription numbers on the rise. NOTE: Your subscribers were not lost during this time, they just weren't being reported by us on your Analyze tab.
Stay tuned to this blog for more gripping updates. This post was brought to you by People for the Excessive Use of of Hyphens and Parentheticals.
Comments
So, will Google Feedfetcher be next?
FeedBurner showed no visits to my site.
But there were 25 hits in 4 1/2 hours.
What is the difference in hits and visits, is time element?
Yes, my feed dipped heavily for some reason and I was very sad that day.
Hey James,
We're glad you're checking out your analyze tab. The "live hits" count that you are referring to is a metric used to measure the activity on your feed. The site visitors mark is one that is part of our StandardStats package which measures activity on your site.
Email us at publishers@feedburner.com and we can take a look at your specific stats and see if we can help you better understand our offering.
Jake Parrillo
Publisher Services Team
FeedBurner
P.S. Go Bears!
What I find interesting is the impact of IE7 and other new browsers on my Feed Stats.
For example, in December I was front-paged on Digg. I received ~50,000 visits, and my feed showed over 1400 readers. But the day after, I was back down in the 100's. A bit of a bummer, but I realize it was just because of all the browser's XML autodiscovery.
I've since been named as a finalist for best new blog in the 2007 bloggies, so my real #'s are back to ~400, but I still see bumps when I get lots of traffic (I was dugg again today, so I expect the same thing tomorrow).
Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter as long as we know what's happening.
BTW - when are you going to convince Google to report their numbers for the Google Reader? Or is that lumped in with "Google Desktop"?
Smiles,
Anita =)
Go Bears!
Hey Traci, I have been so perplexed over this issue but haven't wanted to write (because I have to save my emails to you/John for technical problems, thus ego management must take a back seat.) So thanks for addressing it here. Robbin
Nice little explanation. Keep up the good work guys!
Thanks for this and the TechCrunch write-up.
Interesting and clearly-written...even a technologically-impaired guy like me can get that!
Amish America
Any progress on getting Google to report subscriber counts? I'm seeing a lot of referrals on my blog from Google reader and thus am beginning to think that my feed numbers may be in accurate as a result.
Btw, FeedBurner rocks!
Thanks!
-Steve
So that's why my feed subscriptions go from 0 to oh uhh 0.
Just kidding
Steve - No update yet, but we'll report on our blog just as soon as we know anything definitive.
