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Nine By Blue founder Vanessa Fox is author of the critically acclaimed Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business, which has been called the “search marketing bible” by technology leaders. Be sure to pick up your copy today.
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November 4, 2007
Don't Panic: No, Everyone Didn't Just Unsubscribe From The Internet
My feedburner numbers went down by more than half overnight. I considered spending the day crying in a corner, feeling abandoned and alone, wondering where it all went wrong, but first I thought I’d check a few other sites. Their numbers went down by around half as well.
Did half the population unsubscribe from the internet all of once? Nah, Google Reader just didn’t report numbers for yesterday. Compare my Friday subscription numbers:
to Saturday’s:
Everything looks about the same, except that those 511 subscribers from “Feedfetcher” are conspicuously absent. Reader reports numbers by including them in the request when it grabs a feed. Likely it didn’t include those numbers with requests yesterday due to some kind of a glitch. I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon. Occasional non-reporting of numbers by feed readers is one of the reasons Feedburner numbers tend to fluctuate.
(Note My Yahoo didn’t report numbers for Friday, but since I apparently don’t have many readers on My Yahoo, I didn’t notice.)
Or maybe there’s a “Google Reader subscribers unite in unsubscribing from the internet!” movement, but I’ll give it a few days before heading to that corner with my ocean of lonely tears.
Update: Feedburner has confirmed this as well.
Nobody complained when Google finally provided the number of subscribers in the Feedfetcher UA string. Increasing figures get praised across the boards, decreases due to a glitch are certainly evil. Thanks Vanessa for this reminder to sanity.
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It’s alright, we’re still here reading your feed..
Oddly enough, the first thing I did when I saw my Feedburner haircut was come over here to see where yours was, as we have always generally paced each other.
I can now go on with life, ego resurrected.
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Vanessa it’s the Gremlins…
Vanessa darling check out Shana maybe you can use her for someting.
She maybe the next hot chick on the block.
I’m with you on this one Vanessa, I had a 100 subscriber drop too. a little shocked, but I figured it would just go back up to normal later on. sometimes the weekend does that to my subscriber count.
thanks for the follow-up from feedburner though, good to know it’s a known-glitch.
Yup, everything looks back to normal to me for my site
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Looks like they might be back to having more issues….
anyone else noticing the discrepancies?
Yep. Looks like Reader didn’t report again…
Great…good job Google
@Sebastian – you’re right, nobody complained when they started doing things right. Plenty of us complained *before* they started doing things right, however, and were happy when Google bought Feedburner and they started cooperating.
Clearly, they’ve gotten something broken between them.
It’s a free service, right, so who are we to complain? Well, if their numbers are inconsistent, they won’t be a useful metric–if they’re not a useful metric, people won’t use them anymore. And that will affect their moneymaking business.
I have no doubt that they’ll fix this soon!