I logged in today to see that the subscriber count for BloggingTips had increased from 4,697 yesterday to 5,617 today, a huge jump in subscribers. I was obviously surprised to see this as normally the BloggingTips count grows slowly but steadily. Perhaps Feedburner was previously counting subscibers incorrectly and had now resolved the problem or maybe I just had a huge traffic increase over the last few days.
I visited Feedburner and quickly realised that something was up. A jump in subscribers at BloggingTips is plausible however TimeToTweet had jumped from 26 subscribers to 373, System0 from 33 to 390 and my personal blog from 15 to 365.
So what’s causing these figures to rise? Well, a look at the breakdown quickly shows whats wrong :
As you can see, Feedburner now adds the subscribers from your friendfeed account into your feedburner subscribers count.
In my opinion this is an incredibly bad move from FeedBurner. It is incredibly easy to get people to subscribe to an RSS feed through FriendFeed. Just like Twitter, many people follow anyone who follows them. This means that the feedburner count can be very easily manipulated to show a higher count than it actually has.
This is not good for any of us in my opinion. It’s not good for advertisers and it’s not good for bloggers either. You only have to look at how my blog with 15 subscribers shot up to 365 subscribers in one day to see this.
Some of you might be pleased about this addition and happy to see your feedcount grow but it really isn’t good for any of us. If Feedburner can be easily gamed then it ceases to be a useful and relevent RSS benchmark. Which means that the feedburner count itself becomes completely irrelevant to blog readers and advertisers, which would be a real shame as it’s probably the most reliable way to determine the popularity of a blog.
I haven’t see any announcement about this from Feedburner or FriendFeed so I am crossing my fingers that Feedburner are merely testing something out.
If Feedburner continue to count FriendFeed RSS stats in a blogs feedcount then I’m afraid that today sees the death of Feedburner.
If you know anything about this please leave a comment with a link to any relevant articles. Also, a retweet or digg would be appreciated as I think this is something we need to make people aware of.
Thanks,
Kevin
UPDATE
FriendFeed have just wrote an announcement about this. See their post Subscribers count! for more details (thanks for the link Doug).
I was shocked this morning when I saw a big increase in subscribers. In the end, I think this just makes the feedburner subscription numbers worthless. The service is still useful for it syndication, especially converting rss to email.
I publish a full feed from my blog so subscribers get the same content they would have if they visited the site. I can lump that into traffic as if they were a site visitor.
But friendfeed merely publishes a headline so those friend feed subscribers have a very different experience than the ordinary RSS or email subscribers. In looking at recent traffic, only 10 referrals out of 7,000 came from friendfeed.
Here is the announcement from FriendFeed:
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/06/subscribers-co…
I am going to see if things change. Otherwise, I can just pull my blog from friendfeed or terminate my friend feed account.
Thanks for the link Doug. I've updated my post with your link.
I really can't believe Feedburner have done this. Seriously, don't they realise how easy this makes it to game Feedburner. The problem is, most blog advertising companies use RSS as a benchmark for pricing a blogs ad rate. So now, they cannot use it.
Once everyone knows about this, you will see a lot of blogs who currently have 100 subscribers increase their feedcount to thousands.
Newsflash (not). Feedburner always was and remains easy to cheat. This changes nothing.
As for quality of metric – it is very aproximate anyway, it's weird how people perceive count as set in stone. I think it would be easier to understand if FeedBurner rounded it to something like ~1k instead of precise numbers.
I know it isn't perfect, far from it. However, it has up until now been the best way to measure the popularity of a site.
But it's now gone from being slightly inaccurate to completely inaccurate.
@Kevin
Define popularity.
Sites with high traffic can easily have relatively small subscriber counts. Some smaller sites can have out of proportion large counts.
Count in hundreds of thousands means a lot.
Count in tens of thousands means something.
Anything less means very little.
I agree with you. Traffic is a big part of it too. Plus there are some blogs with small feedcounts which generate a lot of comments and vice versa. However, I still think that feedburner is/was a good way to quickly determine how popular a blog was (or at the very least give you a vague idea of it).
Friendfeed and feedburner are both under Google, is it fair strategy to increase the users for friendfeed?
Ohh my ego just deflated there after a few hours thinking I'd grown awesome overnight! lol
Thanks for letting us know about this – I wouldn't have realised otherwise!
I agree Kevin. It really doesn't make sense to include the FriendFeed count as the two aren't the same thing. Doug describes it well above, but even more when someone subscribes to your feed they are asking to have more of your blog content delivered to them. When some subscribes to your FriendFeed they aren't specifically asking for your blog content. More likely they are looking to follow what you're saying on various social media sites. Two very different things that shouldn't be lumped together.
FeedBurner certainly wasn't perfect, but now the subscriber number is pretty much useless. It's no longer giving an accurate picture of anything.
Then again should we expect anything different. FeedBurner has become less and less useful ever since Google acquired it.
It's not Feedburner's fault, it's because FriendFeed added the subscribers count to the feed and Feedburners sees that count and adds it to the total number of subscribers. Just like Google feedfetcher…
one day my feed count is showing "zero" then i got surprised and then i remove feed count after two it shows normal…
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