If you’ve ever noticed a massive drop in your RSS subscribers in FeedBurner, you know what it feels like to “lose” something.
Today my subscriber count, according to FeedBurner, reads around 7000. It is normally in the low 20,000′s. Everyone experiences this with FeedBurner from me to TechCrunch and in between.
Nothing has really been lost, so there’s no need to panic. But for a day you are going to have to look at that RSS subscriber count (along with all your visitors) until FeedBurner updates again within 24 hours.
What Happens When Your Subscriber Count in FeedBurner Drops Like That?
FeedBurner checks all the feed readers it tracks each day, like Google Reader, Bloglines, and BlogRovr. When one of them is unresponsive at the exact moment FeedBurner is checking your subscriber count through any particular service, it moves on and the count doesn’t happen.
I have about 15,000 subscribers from BlogRovr, so my feeling today is that FeedBurner checked in and didn’t get a fast enough reaction from BlogRovr to make the count. So my day is spent with a FeedBurner chicklet (button) that displays a much lower subscriber count than actual.
What You Can Do About It
Nothing. Enjoy your day. Make some great posts. And wake up tomorrow to a new RSS subscriber count, usually, with the number you expect. This stuff happens in the RSS world. Most bloggers know about it and I’ve seen A-Listers can “lose” 100,000-200,000 RSS subscribers at a time.
They’ll come back. In the meantime check out your stats in FeedBurner. A cool thing is how they’ll show a lower subscriber count but your “hits” that day could be way out of whack above your subscriber numbers. That’s because all your subscribers are still subscribed and checking out your feed, regardless of what FeedBurner is saying about your subscriber count.
