A FeedBurner RSS Count Experiment
Posted by Jon Lee in Offtopic, Site stuff, tags: experiment, Feedburner, google-reader, RSS
I was very busy last week and was unable to post for almost 7 days. However, this was a good opportunity to take a little look into the inner-workings of Feedburner.
My last post before my little one week time off from blogging was on Tuesday, November 13. Without making any posts, my RSS count stayed steady at around 370 for 4 days and then plummeted by over 100 readers overnight!
Two days later, I resumed blogging and the next day, the RSS count jumped back up to the previous count of about 370 subscribers.
A Literal Interpretation?
If you take a literal interpretation of the RSS count, this would mean that over 100 people unsubscribed from my blog because I had stopped posting for a few days. Then they somehow found out I was posting again and resubscribed immediately. Highly unlikely if you ask me!
A More Likely Hypothesis
Looking at the reader breakdown, it seems that almost all of the 100 subscribers that disappeared were Google Reader (Google Feedfetcher) and Google Desktop subscribers. This would suggest that Google stops reporting a subscriber to Feedburner if they have not accessed a feed 4-5 days.
No Signs of Slowing Down!
Surprisingly, during this posting drought, visitor counts did not drop one bit. In fact, they actually went up! Most of this is search engine traffic though, which is an inherent advantage of blogs — the longer your blog has been around, the more content you have and the more search engine traffic you will get over time.
On another note, I have long since stopped using my evil way of increasing RSS readers but with traffic at an all-time high, it may be worth trying to implement it again to see if it still works. 
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