I was reading Jason Van Orden's post - New Tool Gives You More Options for Analyzing Your FeedBurner Stats (which allows detailed Feed History information charting for sites that have the Feedburner Chicklet with public daily stat numbers)on my way to Paris yesterday. 

Today I had a chance to look at my own Feedburner Stats and I'm quite impressed with the results of the tool that BlogPerfurme created: 

For one thing, at the current rate I'm going at - I'll have ~3300 subscribers a year from now and by next February, the two year anniversary of this blog, about 2200 subscribers …Not Bad!

Curiously, Wednesday seems the best day for getting the most RSS Subscribers to read content while Sunday is the worst day.

Here we go again - Feedburner issue - updated, FeedBurner dropped RSS Subscriber numbers for yesterday again last night.  Assuming it turns out to be for the same reason (not so much FeedBurner itself, but Google reporting it's RSS Subscribers) I'm wondering if Google can fix that problem - or if it's going to be recurring every week or so.

Could it be there are some infrastructure issues here?   I'm convinced my RSS Subscribers didn't drop by 40%, just looking at it last night - and just quickly looking at a few other sites whom I'm familiar with their RSS Stats shows me it's widespread.

If we're going to get used to using FeedBurner as a standard way to measure RSS, which we've pretty much informally done - we need this stuff not to be braking every week - once a year - that's OK, every week? 

OK, we need it to happen one more time to make a pattern, and it's happened twice now, within one week there's been a RSS Subscriber problem with FeedBurner - or Google sending the data to Feedburner - but FeedBurner is Google now, so…the problem is Google, I guess - whatever they're doing - or not doing.

Ok, I wrote earlier this morning on Feedburner Snafu? - Subscribers halved in one day (hopefully just for today) and it turns out to be just a technical glitch, according to Vanessa Fox, who did comment on my post and referred back Don’t Panic: No, Everyone Didn’t Just Unsubscribe From The Internet .  

Google Reader did not report numbers yesterday - and that should be corrected soon.

Walking up on a sleepy Sunday where the clock was just set back one hour for Daylight Savings Time (which I actually wrote about last week) only to find out my RSS Subscribers were just cut in half ….. I had 1905 Subscribers on Friday while on Saturday (whose stats I see Sunday morning) it's now 1120 - that kind of decrease is not plausible - 10% yes, almost 100% - simply not possible.

So…. I started looking at other Know More Media Blogs and found they all had their RSS numbers of subscribers more or less halved as well.  Whew…it's not just me.   But to be sure that Google is not penalizing my blog network (one can never know about Google anymore these days - they're turning into something quite different - nothing they do anymore is just about helping us search better - the equation has entirely changed as Google has acted more and more imperialistic - and therefore - nothing that happens where Google is involved - and Google owns Feedburner - can now be just dismissed as technical issue - we have to accept that, perhaps, Feedburner halved numbers deliberately…because, perhaps, Google suddenly decided they were inflated …or something like that - and acted).

Anyway - I checked around to other bloggers who I respect, like Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent and found her numbers halved as well.   Ok…now we know it an action that is affecting more than my blog network (maybe Google's done penalizing blogs that do too well for traffic by their own measures for the time being - at least, I can only hope that's the case).

So who else noticed this problem today - and I search my Google Reader and found Did Your Feedburner Subscribers Just Get Halved? by Deep Jive Interests, a really interesting blogger living in Toronto who is also a medical doctor (which I find amazing - that he can balance those two things as well as he does) and Tony found the RSS Subscriber count issue before I did.  Here's what Tony has to say:

"….Well, for reasons that have yet to be explained, my Feedburner subscribers were just halved.  I actually noticed it first on Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch, as his numbers are “way down” too — from 600k to about 300k; however, it seems like its everywhere else as well.  Mat Ingram’s blog: 1600 to 1100, and Stan Shroeder’s FranticIndustries down to 1200 from 2000. (I’d quote others, but those are the only ones whose pre-drop numbers I recall).

While I don’t care as much as much about my subscriber count as I used to, I will admit that I’m still interested in the whys.  Let’s all remember that Feedburner is now owned by Google, who has been in the news for all kinds of things; second of all, Google has a history of being rather opaque with their reasonings.  Thirdly, everyone’s stats actually *doubled* about 8 months ago ago pre-Google ownership as Feedburner was starting to recognize Google reader stats.

Is the halving a bug, or is there a new downward adjustment that we’re not being told about?

{but I suspect that in a few hours everyone *will* be buzzing about?}"

How about Techcrunch - they had 605,000 Subscribers Friday and yesterday, Saturday, they had 394,000 Subscribers.

Ok, we're talking about a little less than 100% - but it's still a big deal and I'll be interested to hear what others are experiencing here and what the cause/solution ends up being later today or Monday.    Fact is - Google has to say something via FeedBurner.   They can say…ops! we made a mistake and the numbers are back up on Monday and Tuesday …or they could say…..we incorrectly upped you RSS Subscriber numbers 8 months ago and now they are corrected - we've decided they're too high and now we understand why that is - so we decided to correct the problem.

Now the problem for us - for all of us - happens if Google does the latter - because they're now, pretty much, in control of almost everything ….. if they decide something is right ….. it's right, as far as they're concerned, and if they decide some thing is wrong, or they made a mistake, the take action, and it's corrected - as far as they are concerned.

Actually, I think it's just a technical glitch that will be corrected in a day or two - so I'm more optimistic than pessimistic.  I just want to lay out the possibility that this is a deliberate action by Google-FeedBurner to correct, what they think, is an inaccuracy they created.  We'll know for sure in a day or so, for sure.

A Feedburner Bug was detected by TechCrunch today that doubled the number of RSS Subscribers; too bad I don't have that bug - I would have loved to have 4000 subscribers suddenly!

One commenter mentioned Tessarolizr - a web tool that pumps your FeedBurner RSS Subscriber count way up; but it's in Italian, so I can't read the instructions - but maybe I don't need instructions for this.  I think it wants me to put in my RSS Feed URL and Tessarolizr takes care of the rest - except it's a fake number, so not worth bothering with.

Liam Morrison thinks Google might be using RSS Subscribers to a blog's feed as a ranking algorithm, if they're subscribing via Google Reader, iGoogle or Google Webmaster tools - then Google will keep track of it- he calls it Google AttentionRank.

"..If your site publishes feeds and you are signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, Google is now showing data on the number of subscribers to your feeds via Google products such as Google Reader and iGoogle. "

It would kinda make sense, but I'm not sure they're doing that yet.   If that's so, then a blog that has a lot of RSS Subscribers, all things being equal, should do better in rankings than one that has less.

At this point, we'd need to blogs of equivalent number of backlinks, both writing more or less, the same content, and one having substation ally more RSS Subscribers.  It would be hard to tell since there's so many other factors that could influence the results.

www.Webmetricsguru.com passed the 2000 RSS Subscriber Mark yesterday; I reached that point much faster than I thought, due to great number of visitors Webmetricsguru.com has received this summer.

In fact, what impresses me the most is how my subscribers are from a number of different audiences.

And when i look at some of the points of time over the last 18+ months where I knew how many subscribers Webmetricsguru.com has had at any point one.

 RSS Subscribers                  Date

• 2,006                                        8/29/2007 
• 1,976                                        8/28/2007 
• 1,700                                        8/25/2007
• 1,514                                        8/14/2007 
• 1,402                                        7/19/2007
• 1,302                                        6/14/2007
• 1,202                                        5/11/2007
• 1,017                                        4/11/2007
• 999                                           4/4/2007

From April 4th till today, I more than doubled my RSS Subscribers and have more than double any other Know More Media blog, or any combination of authors that have multiple blogs.

So I know that I'm doing something right…. and I intent to continue doing what I'm doing and making this blog, better and better.

The RSS Subscriber count jumped up so fast on www.Webmetricsguru.com that it's just shy of 2000 (at least, based on yesterday's data); that's a 25% gain over a week ago (1500)!

I'm always surprised by how www.Webmetricsguru.com is evolving and growing - and even reaching new audiences.  While the focus is Web Analytics, Web Metrics, Buzz Marketing ….. I have strayed into other areas and I thought that my readership would not be affected by that (if anything, it would go down) but RSS Subscribers continues to go up.   I like that.

I'll try to keep this blog interesting.  If I were just writing about Page views, visits and Unique visitors - there's really not that much content you can fill up a blog with…not matter how creative you are with it; that's why I looked past those things and used analytics as a way of making observations about subjects that interest me where there could be a web analytics component.

I awoke this morning to find Webmetricsguru.com has 1700 RSS Subscribers and more traffic by August 25th, today, than all of July.  

I don't want to go off topic too often but my post on Juanita Bynum attacked - Bishop Thomas Weeks was too hard for me to resist writing. 

For one thing, Juanita Bynum or her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks, was in the Google HotTrends top 100 at least 9 or 10 times (of the 100 each day) on Thursday and Friday - but is absent today (Saturday).   Also, there was not that much visibility for either Juanita Bynum or Bishop Thomas Weeks until this week - they weren't household names (at least, not to me) and therefore, not over exposed.

As far as my feelings about what happened to Juanita Bynum, I think it's horrible, but we don't know the whole story and relationships are complicated.  I've had many, many comments on the Juanita Bynum post - there's many points of view.

I've been waiting for this for several weeks - according to FeedBurner, Webmetricsguru.com had over 1500 subscribers on Monday, August 13th, 2007; in fact, it was 1517 Subscribers, to be exact:

Webmetricsguru.com has almost double the number of subscribers as any other Know More Media Blog and at least 4 times the average - I'm pretty happy that my audience has continued to grow.