The Computer Zone

Every day my RSS numbers fluctuate plus or minus 10 readers every single day. On the weekends the numbers generally go down a lot but during the week it’s really anyones guess as to what the number will be. In general my number of readers is an upward trend but day to day it’s extremely hilly. The real question is, why are the changes in RSS numbers so drastic? Hopefully this article will explain it a little better.

Different type of readers
Feedburner tracks subscribers in two ways. The first are readers that directly access a feed from a standalone feed reader or a web-based feed reader. The second are readers that access feeds through email (if you’ve set it up). Feedburner can have an accurate count of how many direct feed accesses there were in a day but they have to rely solely on numbers reported by various web-based readers as to how many of their users subscribe to a particular feed. Email subscriptions are counted until the user unsubscribes.

Direct Feed Fluctuations
Users that access your feed directly (through a mail client or live bookmarks) will only count as a Feedburner hit if they actually fetched your feed that day. If they had left their computer off or did not open that application on that particular day, they will not be counted as a reader!

Web-based Feed Reader Fluctuations
Errors in subscriber numbers can also occur when web-based readers incorrectly report their subscriber numbers or when they don’t report subscribers altogether. Earlier this month there was a day where Google Reader did not report their subscribers and blog owners around the blogosphere panicked because their RSS numbers dropped 10-50% over night. John Chow talks here about how he lost 4993 RSS subscribers overnight.

Email Subscribers
The good thing about Feedburner and email subscribers is that their numbers are counted continuously whether or not they read the feed in any given day. Only once the reader unsubscribes to your feed does the count actually represent this. John used this to his advantage in his RSS competition against Shoemoney.

Conclusion
If you notice your feed going down over the weekends, don’t worry because it’s probably one of the reasons above. It is better to look at the general trend of RSS readership to get a good idea of how you’re doing. As long as your trend is upward that means in general your reader base is growing, and thats a good thing!

Have you guys ever noticed a large change in your RSS numbers?  What do you to to increase your number?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.