Written on January 18th, 2008 at 07:01 pm by Darren Rowse
The Day Feedburner Stats Went Crazy
Lots of bloggers are jumping around with excitement today at the rise of the Feedburner counters. ProBlogger leapt from around 39,000 subscribers a few days back to 41,000 yesterday and 100,000 today.
Alas - it’s a bug and it seems that a lot of bloggers are seeing their stats are up. There is some discussion on the Feedburner forums here about it. Some are linking it to similar problems at Feedblitz.
All I can recommend is take a screenshot!
46 Responses to “The Day Feedburner Stats Went Crazy”
Dean Taplin
January 18th, 2008 7:46 pm
Alas my figures are still the same. Would have been nice to take a screenshot had they gone up ;-)
Seduction Chronicles
January 18th, 2008 7:49 pm
I just commented on the post before this about your feedburner stats. Wow. Fill us in Darren on how you can 3x your RSS subscribers in 24 hours. Post idea!
P.S. My stats are up by 3 subscribers today! YESSS…. haha
Dustin
January 18th, 2008 7:51 pm
Do you know how much you could charge for advertising with that large of a readership base :)
Brandon
January 18th, 2008 7:51 pm
Poor feedburner.
Yohay
January 18th, 2008 7:58 pm
My stats were stable. No large leap or fall.
I’ve seen such bugs in the past, as Feedburner faltlined.
Since I’m used to seeing such bugs, I don’t get excited any more…
Fadli Wilihandarwo
January 18th, 2008 8:08 pm
Wow, it can make me more confidence. :)
Darren Rowse
January 18th, 2008 8:23 pm
Dustin - good point. Running off to increase advertising rates :-)
It’s interesting though - it definitely isn’t across the board. Most of the blogs I checked are fairly normal.
Lex G
January 18th, 2008 8:28 pm
Hmm didn’t notice anything …
Sue
January 18th, 2008 8:40 pm
Mine went up. Ten times as many. It was way too funny, especially because of the tagline that Feedburner adds to their stats page. Mine read (when I first saw it):
“My Feeds Suspend Their Disbelief.”
Yup, had to take a screen shot of it, viewable at http://hauntedlights.com/images/feedburner.jpg
And it appeared related to Feedblitz for sure, as it was showing 663 from there alone for lighthouse news.
Jirel
January 18th, 2008 8:52 pm
My blog is only 4 and 1/2 months old. So it has regular subscriber 400+.
But today, I am surprised the subscriber to my blog feed went up to 48,884.
I know this is not regular increase.
esvl
January 18th, 2008 8:54 pm
I dont use Feedburner for reasons like this.
BW
January 18th, 2008 9:30 pm
No change here.
However, I have just recently installed a new wp theme and my subscriber numbers have increased significantly (still on the low side, but climbing).
jsanderz
January 18th, 2008 9:54 pm
All these stats are starting to make me feel paranoid, that is why I only look at them 3 times a week, rather than 3 times an hour.
Darren I bet you wish you had reached 100,000 subscribers!
Regards.
Blog opinion
January 18th, 2008 9:57 pm
Yeah ! I agree my subscribers jump up to 490 wow ! :) have they done some changes in their algorithms
WAH(web)Mommy
January 18th, 2008 9:58 pm
LOL, mine went up by 2
Deimos Tel`Arin
January 18th, 2008 10:06 pm
This does not affect me one bit since I do bother much with RSS feeds for my site.
Pssst my RSS feed count is a single digit number. :D
Jan-queenofkaos
January 18th, 2008 10:34 pm
My stats went from 16 to 1700 so I thought there might be a problem. :0)
But it was fun pretending that it was real and that I had hit the subscriber jackpot!
They are back down today but still not correct.
Jo
January 18th, 2008 10:34 pm
Mine went up about 20, but I am a small blog, personal in nature, so was a bit shocked - but alas, I suppose when the bug is fixed it will go back to normal.
Thanks for letting us know.
Anurag Bansal
January 18th, 2008 11:11 pm
Yep,
I posted about it yesterday itself. Because my subscriber count jumped from 50 to 16,107 which was too crazy to believe.
And today, my other blog jumped from 60 to 718.
Here is the post:
http://bokinfo.blogspot.com/2008/01/feedburner-sudden-subscriber-count.html
CompuWorld
January 18th, 2008 11:42 pm
last two times when the numbers fell down I was among those who were hit..
today when they are making you feel at heaven for a day they did not include me..?? :(
Free From Broke
January 18th, 2008 11:51 pm
Aww man, those aren’t real numbers? Bummer!
Sarah
January 18th, 2008 11:57 pm
My stats look normal! Hmmm… it would’ve been nice to at least think I doubled of tripled! Then again… maybe not =P
Ken Y-N
January 19th, 2008 12:05 am
Mine jumped up for yesterday (Thursday 17th) from just under 1,500 to 3,500! FeedBlitz was indeed the culprit, jumping from 6 to 1994.
It’s annoying as RSS subscribers is my favourite metric, so now there’s a huge spike mucking up the numbers.
Frugal Dad
January 19th, 2008 12:19 am
And here I was blaming the spike on dynamic content!
Bylla @ Xavier Media
January 19th, 2008 1:34 am
I wounder if John Chow increase in subscribes by 5K is because of this bug or if his feed really grow 5K in a few days :)
/Andreas
Greg
January 19th, 2008 1:58 am
Eh mine went up by 2. Not worth the screenshot!
CallCenterVet
January 19th, 2008 2:30 am
My Olympics Blog subscribers multiplied over 10 times…
My Call Center Blog subscribers multiplied about 5 times…
Now there’s a positive error I’d like to see NOT corrected! LOL
milton
January 19th, 2008 2:55 am
Awww man! I was over here celebrating the leap from 1 subscriber to 3. The smack of reality stings!
http://werehavingababies.blogspot.com
Dr.Mani
January 19th, 2008 3:06 am
EVEN with that, I’m barely scratching 107.
Oh well ;)
Dr.Mani
Kristen
January 19th, 2008 3:43 am
So I guess my measly 37 subscribers is due to a bug. Go figure…
Sangesh
January 19th, 2008 3:49 am
Okie a small bug ;)
Martin
January 19th, 2008 5:17 am
My counts gone from 46 to 50, I got really exceited I’m gutted now. ;)
CallCenterVet
January 19th, 2008 5:45 am
Here’s an observation. I checked out my feedburner subscriber details and found that the glitch is actually coming from Feedblitz! I have my feedblitz subscribers reflected/included in my feedburner subscriber list. My feedlitz subscribers is about 94% of my total subscribers.
Ron
January 19th, 2008 6:16 am
My stats doubled from 1 to 2 but hey it is still a 100% increase :) . I’ll take what I can get on my brand new blog.
Seriously though it is nice to know that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions if I see a significant increase.
Sonia Simone
January 19th, 2008 7:20 am
I keep checking to see if I can get a cool screen shot, but it doesn’t budge. :)
Brian Auer
January 19th, 2008 7:47 am
My Feedburner jump wasn’t as drastic as some of the others in the comments. I went from ~2300 to ~3300.
993C4S
January 19th, 2008 7:50 am
Just posted this on the FB forum as well.
Is it me, or is the customer support from FB Non-Existent?
It’s pretty obvious that there is a MAJOR issue with FeedBurner going on over the last couple of days, but there has been little to no information provided to the hundreds of thousands of users.
I have seen a few posts on the forum boards (if you search for them) from a FB moderator, but that’s it? Am I missing something?
You would think, that a service such as FB, that is so well used and reviewed (not to mention dependent) upon the blogging community would want to keep its user base up to speed with developments and fixes.
I for one am looking to know when things will be fixed and what the problem was/is. Otherwise, I think it may be time to look for another service.
Am I off base?
John
http://www.993C4S.com/wordpress
Rachel Keslensky
January 19th, 2008 9:47 am
But, but… so my subscribers doubling overnight WASN’T REAL?!
… Wah… I really thought I went from 2 to 6 subscribers!
Online Empire
January 19th, 2008 12:58 pm
All of my sites that I have burner running on have gone through the roof. It looks good to new readers but anyone that follows blogging sites like this are sure to see through the large digits.
JEMi
January 19th, 2008 2:37 pm
you have no idea how sad this makes me
well.. no wonder - I looked at your 100k readers and shook my head saying to my self “My, that Darren Rowse…”
… I still say that though- this blog is amazing.
*sigh* thats ok though.. I appreciate my..very few subscribers :) I’m working on it
Sarah (Real Life)
January 20th, 2008 7:24 am
OMGoodness. I have friends whose blog went from 35 to 554 in a couple of days. I was just saying to my husband yesterday, “How the heck did they get that many subscribers, and what am I doing wrong?”
Mine have been steadily climbing, so I don’t think I’ve been hit. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway.
Jason
January 20th, 2008 10:37 am
I could go for 50,000 or so new readers myself. I figure if I had 50,000 subscribers and made $2 per subscriber I could go pro. Thats a nice thought anyway. :-)
engtech @ IDT
January 21st, 2008 3:57 pm
I knew it was too good to be true.
Kelly
January 22nd, 2008 2:49 pm
Hello, Darren,
Is it happening again today? Last week my subscribers jumped by over 3000% (yes, three thousand percent) on the 18th, then back down, boo-hoo, the next day… today up to over that same beautiful number of subscribers again, which, unless you personally sent your readers to me, is a fairly unlikely one-day jump… any update on what’s wrong with Feedburner? (Or is it the Maximum Customer Experience Blog’s lucky day?)
Feedburner’s blog is uselessly outdated, no help there.
Regards,
Kelly
Kelly
January 23rd, 2008 12:44 am
Darren and all,
Update:
If you’ve had it happen again, apparently it’s being caused by a bug in the code at Feedblitz, who do have a post about the problem right on their homepage, and who promise that all my lovely phantom readers will be gone by Wednesday.
(Non-phantoms always appreciated here.)
Regards,
Kelly
rubu
February 21st, 2008 4:49 am
You would think, that a service such as FB, that is so well used and reviewed (not to mention dependent) upon the blogging community would want to keep its user base up to speed with developments and fixes.
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