My Feedburner Stats are down!!!

Yesterday, a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous but blogs here was troubled and had a question. Both were related to the decrease in the number of readers in FeedBurner. This type of things happen to all bloggers and it can be quite an alarming, and more than often the question Why ? always comes up. I can understand the marketing value of such things, but it for me it would be more practical to keep it at the back of the blog and not out in the open, but then again thats me.

Going back to my friend’s predicament. So why does this happen?

So we in the time honored web way of doing things we did a search and came up with a couple of interesting explanations that can be of help to the diminished-subscriber-stressed blogger.

I. The problem lies with RSS Readers and Aggregators

Digital Inspiration has a post written by Amit Agarwal last February 2, 2007 entitled - Has Your FeedBurner RSS Subscriber Count Gone Down ? Do Not Worry:

It is normal to see minor fluctuations in subscriber numbers reported by Feedburner but if you notice a large variation (in three figures or more), the problem lies somewhere with the feed readers and RSS aggregators such as MyYahoo, Bloglines, Rojo, etc.

These aggregators are either returning incorrect subscriber count to Feedburner or not reporting the count at all and hence Feedburner may not be accounting for those readers. A similar issue happened recently when Feedburner removed the count of Rojo subscribers.[Source]

II. It may depend on the type of feed reader the subscriber uses.

Darren Rowse at ProbloggerProblogger discussed this effectively at length in his post Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate? posted August 16, 2007. In his post he wrote about the two types of web readers, (i) standalone readers and (ii) web-based readers, and its possible impact on reader stats.

In the case of stand-alone feed readers, that user has an application running on their computer which fetches the feed repeatedly throughout the day. We look at characteristics of those requests, and differentiate between repeated requests from the same person (as indicated by regular polling intervals, consistent IP addresses, and common user agents) and different requests (where one or more of the previous data points vary).

In the case of web-based feed readers (My Yahoo, Google Reader, Bloglines, Pageflakes, etc.), those services retrieve the feed repeatedly throughout the day, but do so on behalf of multiple people. Almost all of these services report to us how many of their users are subscribed to the feed. At the end of the day, we tally up how many stand-alone feed readers are subscribed, and add them to the web-based users. The end result is the total subscriber number we report. (I’m leaving a few details out; see below for a more complete answer.)

The fluctuations are almost always due to people using stand-alone computers who don’t turn their computer on, or don’t load their feed reader on a given day. If their feed reader doesn’t ask for the feed that day, we don’t see them, and consequently don’t include them as a subscriber. (note from Darren - this is why on weekends numbers tend to go down as a result of less people checking their feed reader). [Source]

III. It may be an after effect of being Dugg

A question in Tyme Whites’ FeedBurner Rick Klau Interview Part 2 provided additional information concerning Dugg and Feedburner Count.

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on. [Source]

These are the most plausible explanations I have seen. Would you know any other explanation?