What Causes Daily RSS Fluctuations?
Posted by Jon Lee in Offtopic, Site stuff, tags: Feedburner, RSSI got asked this question in an e-mail after my previous post about why I suffered a drastic decrease in RSS readers only to recover a few days later.
If you keep a close eye on your RSS count, you’ll notice that it goes up and down every single day. You may also notice that subscriber count generally decreases during weekends. Problogger actually has a good article that answers exactly this so I will summarize it here.
Why does this happen?
The way Feedburner works, they track subscribers in two ways. The first are readers that directly access a feed from a standalone feed-reader. The second are readers that access feeds through a web-based feed reader. In the case of web-based feed readers, they do not directly access your feed, instead the service accesses the feed every so often and pushes new articles to their users.
Feedburner can have an accurate count of how many direct feed accesses there were in a day but they have to rely solely on numbers reported by various web-based readers as to how many of their users subscribe to a particular feed.
Direct Feed Fluctuations
Users that access your feed directly (through a mail client or live bookmarks) will only count as a Feedburner hit if they actually fetched your feed that day. If they had left their computer off or did not open that application on that particular day, they will not be counted as a reader!
Note that visitors using old versions of Firefox may be falsely reported as a RSS reader and this miscount may be further enhanced by a little evil trick.
Web-based Feed Reader Fluctuations
Errors in subscriber numbers can also arise when web-based readers incorrectly report their subscriber numbers or when they don’t report subscribers altogether. Earlier this month there was a day where Google Reader did not report their subscribers and blog owners around the blogosphere panicked.
Second, in my findings from my previous post, it appears that Google stops counting a user 4-5 days after the last time they access a feed. I can only assume other web-based RSS readers do something similar.
Conclusion
If you notice your feed going down over the weekends ,don’t worry because it’s probably one of the reasons above. It is better to look at the general trend of RSS readership to get a good idea of how you’re doing!
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These seem rather inaccurate. Although they would explain the frequent fluctuations in recordings of the numbers of subscribers to my blog each day and for that matter every hour. I think all the RSS info is not as accurate as we all think.
Andy
Recently, Feedburner has been having issues with reading the Google reader subscribers correctly..Hence the fluctuation
I see that you are lot of thought to RSS counts these days? Good for us, maybe we will all gain some insight.
you been tagged.
http://bloggingthemovie.com/nofollow-link-train-contest/
Okay. That is a fairly detailed tutorial explaining the fluctuation. I would really appreciate another post on why the RSS count is necessary/important?
I have actually already read the post over at problogger a while back. It was very good at explaining it I felt.
[...] to wait for a month before checking how it went, but after reading Jonlee’s post explaining What Causes RSS Fluctuations, my itchy fingers got the better of me and I had to take a peep. The figure that greeted me was far [...]
Yes do tell! Why IS RSS count so all important??
You’re right, RSS subscriber info is not accurate but it is 10000x more accurate than something like Alexa ranking or even the seemingly arbitrary pagerank
Many blogs have covered this topic already, maybe I’ll collect them all and make a link post
I had a few questions about this a while back. But, unlike you, I didn’t care enough to do any research. Thanks for the helpful post.
Well the number of subscribers relates to the amount of potential traffic you can be getting, basically.
I would say same tone, I never find the use of RSS anyway.. dont now is rss syndication still relevant anymore to attract traffic
RSS must die
Some of my websites also had these problems.. Although I was suspecting some of the reasons listed above plus I had my own theories in mind now I know why my RSS reader count fluctuated..