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.