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Jan. 18, 2008 at 7:16am Eastern by Danny Sullivan
FeedBurner Numbers Spike -- Blame FeedBlitz!
Nice -- I picked up 5,000 new feed subscribers today, while Barry Schwartz saw Search Engine Roundtable grow 35,000. Overnight! Obviously, the FeedBurner numbers we and others get have gone wonky. To blame? FeedBlitz seems to be putting out bad stats.
Consider the comparison above. The left side shows reported subscribers from various feed reading services taking the Search Engine Land feed as of Wednesday, January 16. The right side shows Thursday, January 17. See the box highlighted in red? Out of the blue, FeedBlitz appears, telling me that I have 5,177 readers.
Here's what Barry saw:
See FeedBlitz? He got 36,464 readers, which for him is normally 1,000.
Yesterday, FeedBurner's Rick Klau twittered that FeedBlitz was showing inflated numbers. Today, it looks to have gotten worse, such as being covered also in this FeedBurner support thread.
This isn't the first time bad numbers from feed readers had caused FeedBurner users to scratch their heads, but it ultimately comes back to the aggregators themselves reporting correct figures.
Be sure to read our past post, How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers. It goes into depth about how FeedBurner pulls in stats and issues that can sometimes make them seem odd.
Postscript: I see now FeedBlitz itself has a short blog post acknowledging the problem.
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By Danny Sullivan
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