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Thursday, January 17, 2008

FeedBurner Feedcount Chicklets Gone Wild!

Imagine the look on my face when I looked at my feedburner feedcount chicklet and it said,

And I was like,

Now THAT'S What I'm Talkin' About!

I've watched my feedburner feedcount chiclet climb from 229 to 308 in just the last 2-3 months since I took blogging way more seriously but I always felt, somewhere in my gut, that something wasn't right with Feedburner's reporting on feed subscribers.  And there were no shortage of others who had complained about the various discrpencies.

So, at 1,074, I was like, "Now THAT just seems more like it..." but a quick jaunt over to the Feedburner Forums saw a handful of people having the same problem - TOO MANY SUBSCRIBERS!

I had to wonder why more bloggers weren't complaining and then, being the "controversy blog" owner, it dawned on me...

They Were Probably All Thinking the Same Thing And Gearing Up to Sell Ad Space at Double Their Usual Price!

Ya gotta love marketers and money-hungry bloggers...!  Anyone else see a huge leap in their feedcounts?

(UPDATE: When you're done reading this article, here is the follow-up)

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16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting... While I have seen a bit of an increase in my feedburner stats the discrepancies haven't been that great.

I still don't totally get how they do their stats. I guess i need to spend some more time in the forum. :)

Anonymous said...

I never installed the counter before. Today was the first day I ever asked someone to sign up for a feed so my numbers should be low. Maybe you really do have that many subscribers?

Deimos Tel`Arin said...

I don't promote my site's RSS feed thingies so my feed count is still a single digit number.

Wooohoo!

Anonymous said...

Ok, I checked this chicklet out. It tells you the number of times your feedburner feed was accessed today. NOT the number of people who signed up for it. I could be partly to blame Sam. I'm using a widget that grabs your feed and links automatically to your last headline. It's supposed to update once every 3 hours. Strangely enough, none of the other sites I link to including my own report excessive feed counts.

Big Pappa said...

Yeah, holy crap - That is a huge jump. I have had a move but it was from 50 to 120, nothing like you had.

Anonymous said...

Have you checked for scrapers? I imagine with all the publicity of EC that there's probably going to be a lot more of that going on. That could explain such a high number.

Someone even scraped Jinxed. I thought it was hilarious, though (considering my acerbic nature...heh).

Anonymous said...

I had a 12% increase today. Nothing like you had though.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately my feedburner stats are slowly rising. Like watching a pot of water boil. I have gone from 43 to 56, but like you, I'm hoping to see more of an increase -- at least triple digits in my case.

But the struggle has been just that a long, slow struggle. I feel like I painstakingly earn each subscriber and that's frustrating.

Hey, wanna subscribe to Cardiogirl?

Sam Freedom said...

@barry - I think the confusion over their stat reporting is common. No one really knows but we still feel good watching it go up. And, when you think about it, that's probably one of the reasons they don't charge $ for then people could demand accuracy.

@turnip - good you finally signed up to have your feed burned. If you don't have one, people tend to scratch their heads wondering if they are just missing it because they are so commonplace now.

@deimos - promoting it can be as simple as making sure people clearly see it. And if they like your articles, they'll find it on their own but you WILL increase your numbers even more if you just keep giving short, gentle reminders to subscribe. People have a lot on their minds and you are actually helping them by making sure they are aware of the benefits of subscribing to you.

@turnip (2nd time) - It turns out it had to do with Feedblitz who many use as a means to subscribe to feeds by email. They had a strange surge of some kind and it over-polled a bunch of feeds somehow and sent the feedburner stats through the roof.

@bigpap - 50 to 120 is still a real lot to jump... and it must have been a real tease because it is, at least, believable.

@jennyjinx - I do check for scrapers but only to thank them and to comment on each of my articles that they scrape. I am pretty sure most don't actually pick and choose specific blogs but rather their scraping software is keyword-based and they are just trying to get as much content as possible to get people to their ad-based sites. The software can't be programmed to filter out ascerbic wit but you've given me an idea for my programmer. ;-)

@cardiogirl - oh cmon, you're doing fine! That's just growing pains. I've said it before that most of the people don't even realize what a blessing Entrecard has been for them because if it had not been around, I assure you that your water-boiling analogy would be more like "watching mold grow" or "watching icicles form" - there's 100s of 1000s of blogs starting up every day and only 3000 are at Entrecard all getting to know each other. The others just have no clue what they are up against just starting out so congratulations.

itot54joni said...

im not happy having that huge feedcount because i don't have ads on my feeds..from 36, now its 2010.i hope it will be fix soon. :(

1Y0-264 braindumps said...

well nice topic you choose for discussion. i am not interested in the feed burner. and i am not promoting so my feed count are nill.

testking 70-551 said...

Feedburner is a very popular feed aggregator and provides a host of services which you can tap on to publicize and promote your Blog. One widely used service is their FeedCount Chicklet which displays your Blog Feed's circulation statistics. The chicklet can be static (displaying the number of “readers”) or animated (showing the number of “readers” via feed). Although you can change the background and text color for the graphic display, there is no option for you to change the text. This hack will explain how to change and personalize the FeedCount Chicklet text as well as to change the animation settings so that it rolls the text more than once.

testking 646-976 said...

For those who have yet to sign up for a Feedburner account, consider doing so right away. Now that it is under the Google family, there is an easy way for you to channel all your Blogger feed subscribers to Feedburner. Login to Blogger, and under Settings -> Site Feed, enter your Blog's Feedburner Feed address into the box beside “Post Feed Redirect URL.” Readers who click the “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)” link or the RSS icon in their browsers will be redirected to your Feedburner Feed.

Internet Marketing Coaching said...

So from your follow up post then it seems your extra traffic was all due to a bug? Did you get any value at all from the extra visitors?

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