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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