FeedBurner's count goes crazy

Today I noticed what looks to be yet another glitch from FeedBurner. There was a serious overnight jump in the number of RSS subscribers on some popular blogs, and I do mean a serious jump. At least that's what we're seeing on the feed count chicklets, can't say for sure if the back end stats are matching this.

It looks like a number of sites increased their RSS feed subscriber count by about 50k people overnight. Techcrunch jumped from 62k to 113k. Emily Chang went from 1k subscribers to 52k. Ehub had around 5k thousand yesterday and is now at 56k. Read/Write Web has gone from 18k to 70k today. CSS Mania is up from 1k to 52k, coincidentally the same as Emily Chang's. SEW Blog jumped up from 10k to 64k today. 37signals subscriber count has increased from 23k to 78k.

Now, did the mainstream finally figure out what RSS feeds are, or does FeedBurner just have a serious glitch? The again, maybe these are the correct numbers and they just were wrong before. Whatever it is, that's a nice little gift for these bloggers.

This is making Mashable's count of 5 billion look a little more realistic.

Update: FeedBurner has responded and the problem is with NetVibes, which is adding 50,866 readers for all feeds.

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Reader Comments (9)

Pete Cashmore, June 1, 2006

I'm 100% sure it's a glitch - my (real) stats went up by around 50k, while the stats for previous days are all displaying as zero.

Jake Parrillo, June 1, 2006

Brian,

Hi...I think we'll have to wait for IE7 and Vista before we all see numbers this high! ;)

We're aware of the issue and have posted this on our forums:

http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=4712

Jake Parrillo, June 1, 2006

whoops! I meant Cameron!

sorry....

Cameron Olthuis, June 1, 2006

Jake, Glad to see your guys are watching your buzz! - Your right, IE7 and Vista should make a dramatic impact on RSS adoption, can we all say mainstream?

Cliff Spence, June 2, 2006

We had some fun with this one last night and thought we'd post our own modified chicklet for others. ;)

Cameron Olthuis, June 2, 2006

Cliff, that's pretty funny stuff. I especially like the fraction chicklet.

Emily, June 12, 2006

Hi Cameron. Thanks for noticing :) Feedburner posted about it on June 1. My feed stats are still higher than usual but that's because of new readers from the Netvibes ecosystem.

Craig, December 18, 2006

Has anyone had problems with Feedburner losing subscribers. I am at 0. Any thoughts?

Neil Patel, December 19, 2006

Craig, I have not experienced that before. You may want to contact FeedBurner support.