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It Isn’t Easy Being Feedburner’s Emotional Slave

Written by Jason Boom on February 21, 2008 – 8:53 pm

Google Swallowing Feedburner I think this post title sums up my feelings from this morning. I woke up to find my Feedburner count had dropped by 11 subscribers. I quickly felt the pang of defeat. I wanted to know what could cause such a sudden drop in readership. I had written good content, right?

I did a quick blog search through Google. I think this is the quickest way to find out what’s happening in the blogosphere. I found a number of articles talking about Feedburner counts dropping yet again. The first search I found took me to the Feedburner blog, which had a post from yesterday.

Google Integrating Feedburner
It sounds like the big G will be swallowing fire. The Feedburner crew has been hard at work behind the scenes making their service more Googley. It wasn’t until I read the comments on the post that I found the culprit for my lost subscribers.

Google Reader numbers were not counted yesterday. Oh, the irony.

So while integrating the service to be architecturally similar to Google’s backend architecture (i.e. putting/removing the junk in the trunk), they somehow lost touch with their very own service. I guess those are growing pains. Or is that indigestion? I don’t know for sure.

Living by Numbers
Needless to say, it’s rough losing 20% of my subscribers overnight. Someone on the comments of the Feedburner blog said their blog went from 500 to 150 overnight. I must say that’s a lot of Google Reader readers. I might have fallen out of my chair had I seen that much of a drop. As it was, my drop had me re-reading my past posts, looking for offending material. I’m glad it was just a glitch. You’re all still here, right?

Do you know how Feedburner counts subscribers? Curious? Mr Javo put up a nice discussion on the topic last week. You might check that out. In the meantime, I’m off to russle up some subscribers.

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17 Comments to “It Isn’t Easy Being Feedburner’s Emotional Slave”

Mr. Javo (Who am I?) Says:
February 21st, 2008 at 8:58 pm

Google slapped us once again!!! my reader’s counter drops by 30, and everybody is talking about that on twitter, digg etc etc…..I saw a blog with 800 readers and today it has almost 400 =S

I told you before Jason, Google hate bloggers.

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 21st, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Haha, yeah that’s right. They hate us. I think the Feedburner folks get a kick out of seeing everyone jump.

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Blogfeld (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:14 am
yeah, it can be hard. that’s why i don’t display mine….yet.

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Mr. Javo (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:30 am
Haha good choice Blogfeld, but you should show it if you have more than 50 readers…thats my opinion.
The feedburner counters are back, I have my 110+ readers again

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Zack (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:03 am

Wow, Jason, I know the feeling. Saw the same thing on my end. I have decided to only look at my google analytics and detach from feedburner stats to avoid the emotional rollercoaster. I’ll check ‘em, mind you, but I won’t worry about it. It just distracts me from writing good stuff.

And I hear you Mr. Javo, but I have decided to make it a personal goal to not post my feed count until I have 1000 regular readers. That way, I know I’m not influencing folks to subscribe with anything at all but pure, world class, tasty content. O, and I also like to do things the hard way.

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Louie (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:25 am

Even if I have only 37 subscribers, I am proud of them Then it happened to me too. My subscribers dropped to 23. I already thought that something is wrong with feedburner. But they fixed it already. My subscribers went back to normal today. Thanks for sharing this and clearing this up.

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Jonathon (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm

Yeah I noticed the same thing yesterday.

Quick question:
I have a fairly new blog and so far have managed to get 32 readers, which I have displayed on my site. Should I take that off until I get 50, or just leave it since I am making decent progress (IMO)? Thanks

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:21 pm

@Blogfeld: I just started displaying mine and this fiasco had me reconsidering that move.

@Zack: I can’t help myself. I’m trained I guess. 1000 readers is a ton. Good luck with that move. 500 would be impressive, but 1000 would be monumental!

@Louie: Hey our subscribers are our lifeblood. I wouldn’t keep writing if no one was reading. I’m glad I could shed some light on the situation.

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm

Hi Jonathon, You can do that if you wish. Some of us prefer to show it after we have 50 or 100 or some other number. It’s really up to you.

Some feel that after 50 others will jump on just to see what everyone finds interesting about your blog. It’s peer pressure.

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Jonathon (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Thanks for the advice! Oh,a nd nice blog by the way. Maybe I will fall for your peer pressure

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Jason - GorillaSushi (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm

I remember a year or two ago when my Feedburner numbers were over 600 and then they dropped to about 25. Turns out they were receiving horribly wrong numbers from Google and Rojo for months. Turns out I only had 25 subscribers. I’ve taken all of their other hiccups in stride since then.

Technocrati on the other hand…those guys are just plain messing with me some days…

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Hi Jason, that’s quite a drop. I can’t imagine having that terrible of a service from them. You pulled out of it though.

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Gary R. Hess (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 pm

Eh, I don’t care either way. This is news to me, I don’t follow the news on feedburner. I’m a fan, but I just like to check the numbers every now and again and view it over a long period of time. If everyone took a hit (although, I really didn’t notice anything in my numbers) then it shouldn’t matter anyway. The same amount of people are still reading your blog, and that is all that matters.

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm

Intellectually I know you’re right. I probably obsess over it a little too much on certain days. It may just be the newness of the blog. I want the positive reinforcement.

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Pastor Phil (Who am I?) Says:
February 23rd, 2008 at 7:38 am

Hi Jason,
Blogging is the mainstream of events on the internet, not everyone likes what is happening here… especially those big internet marketeers like Google. The main thing to remember is that more and more people want to read the blogs and learn how to make the internet better for the reader and not the money changers. Keep up the great work, I love it!!

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ViralKing (Who am I?) Says:
February 24th, 2008 at 7:06 am

Hmm - Yeah my feedburner I notice dropping as well at times and it gets me down as I feel im putting out good content too. Almost makes me wonder if my time is not better spent, but I intend to stick with it

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Jason Boom (Who am I?) Says:
February 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Hey ViralKing, It’s best to just persist. I have to be on that mode from time to time. It does get frustrating to see those numbers dip.

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