Feedburner: Subscribers Suddenly Going Down

First of all, after looking through all the forums, I figured this would be the best spot for this topic.

That being said, last night, I had about 386 subscribers. Now, today, I have 289. Do people just unsubscribe in droves. I've just started paying attention to Feedburner - so this could be a regular occurrance, but it's troubling to say the least.

Anyone know why this would happen?

Thanks!
Kelly

 

mine tend to go up and down every day, but not usually by that much, maybe 10%.

 

Eh. I knew it. I'm hated. *cries*

I made Digg.com on Monday, so perhaps people signed up and then decided they didn't want to.

 

Actually, from my experience the numbers can vary a LOT. It is REALLY hard to measure RSS subscribers accurately. I would not put tons of faith in those numbers. Also, if people click on the RSS subscription link on your site, but then don't actually end up subscribing, it will look like you have more subscribers for a short time before it drops down again. So it could even be digg traffic that clicked on your RSS link but didn't even subscribe.

 

Ah! Thank you so much, mvolpe! That makes me feel somewhat better.

 

Blondeheroine --

Feedburner stats are measured not by the number of people that are subdcribed, but by the number of people that have read the feed on the given day.

Don't worry, you still have ~400+ subscribers -- but only 289 of them have read the feed on the given day.

 

Thanks for sharing the fact ouro! I just learn new things today

 

Subscribers suddenly going down usually during the weekends.

 

Thank you SO much Ouro!!

 

Also, feedburner sometimes just totally fails to count stats of those subscribed from Google Reader. People I've known have lost more than 500 subscribers in a day only to get it back in a few days

 

That's good to know. I use Google Reader myself and I saw a Problogger article recently that suggests that a majority of people now use Google Reader. So that could really skew the numbers.

Thanks!

 

thats what happens to me too. I guess I now know why this happens

 

I see this trend in my subscribers too. Although, I would have assumed that people would be on the computer MORE reading in their free time then during the week.

 

See, that was my thought, too, but according to an article I read about Digging your blog posts, the best time to digg is about 8 in the morning during weekdays because most people spend most of their leisure web hours at work. So, I guess we know what people are REALLY doing at work.

 

Haha, well I guess so!

 

yeah i noticed i lost about 20 odd since last 3 days currently at around 4055 subscribers.

 

just look at SEOmoz and shoemoneys subscribers, they can halve day to day, its not accurate...