April 1st Feedburner Subscriber Drop

Posted At : April 3, 2009 11:12 AM | Posted By : Kent C
Related Categories: General


Everyone hates you.
APRIL FOOLS!

Maybe you noticed that around April 1st your feedburner subscribers dropped—a lot. In our case 3/5ths of our subscribers abandoned us. Naturally I believed this to be a glitch and ignored it. Two days later I can firmly say that we're still reading way below par.

On the advice of DavidF I checked out Google blog search and eventually found a post on the Feedburner help forum where MattS explained:

"If you compare individual days (e.g., March 31 vs. April 1) in Analyze > Feed Stats > Subscribers, I'm guessing most of the missing subscribers are from Google Feedfetcher. We've notified that team of the temporary drop in subscribers we're seeing reported by them and will work with them to resolve the issue."

We checked this out and sure enough feedfetcher registered all of 1 subscriber for April 1st.

So have no fear, bloggers. The internet does not hate you.

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Probably because our reader demographics/psychographics are similar, but we're about 40% Google Feedfetcher too. And yep, we see the dip too. Do you think Google did that on purpose?
# Posted By Linda Bustos | 4/3/09 4:07 PM
While the timing is suspicious I doubt an April fools joke would have gone on for three days, especially with as little press as this got.

But if it was an April fools joke, it was a mean one.
# Posted By KentC | 4/6/09 9:19 AM
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