Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?
If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night …
Context & Ripple Effects
FeedBurner's subscriber badge had become the de facto public scorecard for blogs by late 2007, and its numbers were only as good as the crawlers that fed them. Google had already been forced to explain the mechanics that summer — a September post on the Webmaster Central blog laid out how Feedfetcher counts readers — and its track record was shaky: Google Reader went down for extended periods back in June, and in October Mashable published side-by-side evidence that Reader's own stats didn't hold up to scrutiny.
So when Saturday, November 3rd summaries showed steep subscriber drops across the board, the pattern pointed at the counting infrastructure rather than at any publisher's audience. The confirmed cause — Feedfetcher's subscriber stats offline during the crawl window — matters because Google is not just one input among many; it is the dominant source feeding FeedBurner's headline number.
First-order effects
- Publishers who benchmark week-over-week growth against their FeedBurner badge saw an artificial cliff in their November 3rd numbers, with no corresponding loss of actual readers.
- FeedBurner's headline metric took the reputational hit: the service's value rests on aggregating fetchers like Feedfetcher, so Google's blind spot became every publisher's bad data day.
Second-order effects
- Anyone pricing ads or sponsorships off FeedBurner counts inherits the volatility — a single-crawler outage now distorts the negotiation baseline until stats recover.
- The incident compounds existing doubt about feed measurement, giving skeptics (Mashable's October critique among them) fresh ammunition to argue the badge understates or misstates real audiences.
Third-order effects
- Blog audience measurement is structurally dependent on a handful of crawler operators — above all Google — meaning publishers' most visible metric can move without any change in reader behavior; if that dependency holds, pressure will build for independent or multi-source verification of feed stats.
The trend: Feed subscriber counts are consolidating into a de facto audience currency for the blogosphere even as their accuracy remains hostage to a single dominant fetcher.