A few hours back when the Feedburner RSS counter chicklet that thousands of blogs use to show their subscriber numbers updated bloggers everywhere scratched their heads in wonder.
I’ve had about 10 emails in the last couple of hours from many asking if I’d noticed the difference – a massive slump in numbers.
I suspect it’s just a glitch in Feedburner’s system – or a glitch in one of the major News Aggregators reporting. It’s happened before and I don’t really think that there’s any reason to panic as it looks like it is something that has hit everyone with the chicklet (from what I can see it’s hitting people by between 40-50%).
Thanks to everyone for the heads up – David was first.
Update: looking over Feedburner stats it seems that it’s the ‘Google Feedfetcher’ stats that are not showing up.
Here are yesterday’s breakdown of stats for my Digital Photography School feed:
Here are the stats for today:
As you can see – it’s the Google Feedfetcher stats that are missing today. From memory this happened once before and was rectified the following day.
I lost over half of my subscribers because of this, it was terrifying until I found out it was just a glitch.
Thanks for sorting that out. I was wondering what was the deal with that. I thought my readers had deserted me!
Is it not ironic that Google’s FeedBurner is losing Google’s Feed Fetcher? I still find it funny that you need a workaround to display the FeedBurner headline animator in Gmail.
But then, I am easily amused.
Google’s FeedBurner has acted up again. tsk tsk tsk. I wonder what are they doing with their system?
It’s happened again to me. Yesterday and today. Google Feed Fetcher missing almost entirely from the pie.
One way to figure out if someone’s inflating their numbers is to check the number of comments they get per post. A high subscriber count and low number of comments would be suspicious except under certain circumstances, like if you write a blog about chronic shyness.