Understanding feed count fluctuations
The Feedburner users out there will probably have already noticed the fluctuations that their feed count suffer over the time. Moreover, if you pay attention you will notice that during week days when you pump many posts the feed count will peak, while on weekends and on days that you do not post that number will decline (sometimes heavily, for the despair of the blogger).
There is simple explanation for this fact, though. Feedburner delivers your feed to a myriad of RSS readers. There are basically two types of RSS readers: web-based readers like Bloglines or MyYahoo and on-demand readers like FireFox Live Bookmarks. The web-based readers will pull your feed whether the subscriber opens his reader page or not, hence why the feed count for web-based readers is stable over the time. On-demand readers, however, will only be counted if the user actually accesses the feed on a particular day.
Here is a quote from Eric Olson, responsible of the Publisher Services for Feedburner:
We can only track the subscriber we see in a given day. If someone doesn’t open their feedreader or live bookmarks than we can’t count them that day and won’t count them on your stats.
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20 Responses to “Understanding feed count fluctuations”
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I wouldn’t worry about it. Realistically I only see a less than 15% swing on the weekends versus weekdays. I honestly don’t think anyone but me would be paying enough attention to even notice it.
engtech, you have a valid point.
the main idea of my post was to explain the why the fluctiations happen in the first place
My blog’s biggest peek was at 1300 subscribers, today it averages 550-800,
Allen.H
Allen,
I had not considered a case where there is a sharp readership drop, and you are right.
I guess, as Engtech said, that the day to day fluctuations do not bother anyone after all, hence why I removed the last part of the post.
Thanks for correcting me on this one guys, those are the benefits of writing a blog as opposed to a book.
It’s rarely much more than a quarter of that normally. That’s not a fluctuation: it’s a weird spike.
By providing external validation, you’re reassuring potential sponsors.
sorry – I see you’ve already addressed this…
no problems Ian, I agree 100% with what you guys said.
Thanks for the simple–yet previously unknown to me–explanation!
I’ve always wondered why my feed count is lower on weekends. Thanks for clearing it up.
Nice to know this about feedburner. My blog is too new to have fluctuations in its count, but I have noticed it in other blogs.
Keep up the good work Daniel!
Excellent post on the fluctuation. It seems like I’ve read this before, but this really nails it on the head.
Thanks for the post. I’ve been wondering about the reasons for Feedburner’s fluctuations for months!
Great post, i have been wondering this for sometime now
It can really annoy me sometimes. They should offer a way to exclude the on-demand reader count from the Feedburner count.
Or to just split the two up.
Thanks for your information. I give great interesting for this blog. Good.
my new blog has only 60 subscribers
My fluctuations are sometimes plus or minus six people, which is fine. However, they are regularly 300 (75 per cent) of my readership. I’m not sure this can be explained by the above. The 300 drops do not happen on set days of the week, either, but appear to be totally random.