Feedburner Subscriber Fluctuation May Not Mean You Have Less Subscribers

Feedburner reader fluctuations would always surprise me and often baffle my mind. Some day it would shoot through the roof and on other days, it would stay low.

I failed to understand the phenomenon and did some search, and found the answer.

The answer or the explanation is from Rick Klau via Problogger (Feedburner’s Vice President of Publisher Services then, now in Google Profiles)

Here is the explanation

Feedburner takes into account  following subscribers on a particular day [What you see in the stat counter is the number of  active subscribers on a given day and not all the subscribers].

1. those using a stand-alone feed reader
2. those using a web-based feed reader

He further states that the fluctuations are mostly due to  people using stand-alone computers who do not turn their computer on, or don’t load their feed reader on a given day.

Here is the line

If their feed reader doesn’t ask for the feed that day, we don’t see them, and consequently don’t include them as a subscriber.

There were other minor reasons mentioned but this makes sense.

So! Never mind the fluctuation. When it is down, some computers are sleeping.

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