Comments on: Feedburner Counts Appear Incorrectly High Because of FriendFeed

By: Rajesh Kumar Chekuri

Rajesh Kumar Chekuri — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:29:51 +0000

one day my feed count is showing "zero" then i got surprised and then i remove feed count after two it shows normal... funny scraps A blog for all about humor and funny scraps….

By: Better Feedburner Stats with FriendFeed | Wulf

Better Feedburner Stats with FriendFeed | Wulf — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:29:10 +0000

[...] is a down side, however, as Kevin notes at bloggingtips. In my opinion this is an incredibly bad move from FeedBurner. It is incredibly easy to get people [...]

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:29:54 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:29:54 +0000

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…

By: Marylin

Marylin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:03:16 +0000

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!

By: Wallace

Wallace — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:59:13 +0000

Friendfeed and feedburner are both under Google, is it fair strategy to increase the users for friendfeed?

By: Kevin Muldoon

Kevin Muldoon — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:12:04 +0000

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).

By: Rarst

Rarst — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:55:43 +0000

@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.

By: Kevin Muldoon

Kevin Muldoon — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:02:57 +0000

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.

By: Rarst

Rarst — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:55:18 +0000

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.

By: Kevin Muldoon

Kevin Muldoon — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:49:16 +0000

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.

By: Doug Cornelius

Doug Cornelius — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:34:59 +0000

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.