Yesterday I saw my feedburner numbers for RSS subscriptions increase by about 250%. Also from Feedburner I noticed a huge jump in Google Reader subscriptions. Ok so 1 of 2 things is going on… either someone is messing with me or something changed with Google Reader. Turns out it was Google reader. You see until yesterday readers using Google reader would pull your feed through Google (not directly visit your site). This is also how almost all other web based news readers worked in that the provider would spider your feed then cache it for all the readers. This of course makes sense but it really screws up your numbers because you can never get a accurate count of how many people are using your Feed.
Well yesterday Google Reader was altered to show how many subscribers are in your feed. Now you have true stats in FeedBurner reflecting it. Since about 60% of people that subscribe to my feed use Google Reader my numbers jumped quite a bit.
Now I am noticing other peoples numbers jumping drastically also!
Techcrunch went from 170,000 to 270,000
problogger.net jumped from 10,000 to 18,759
So if you are wondering if its a bug or not… its not 
EDIT: I found Google Reader actually has its own blog and explains on it on there also.
February 17, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Happened to me as well. My Feedburner subscribers jumped up by about 40%. Happened just last night.
February 17, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Yup me too. Giant leap from 453,578,885 to 989,378,483.
My blog has huge reach.
February 17, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Yep, my FeedBurner stats jumped about 22% – very nice.
February 17, 2007 at 9:51 pm
LMAO… michael just sent me the link to this because I asked him about his feed after seeing the same thing you did (only my feed subs went over a little under 100%). Hmmm, very interesting…
February 17, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Dammit. I thought I suddenly got really popular.
February 18, 2007 at 6:40 am
My stats jumped from ~3,000 subscribers to just under 15,000 I still think there’s some sort of error as that just seems a crazy increase and percentage market share to Google.
February 18, 2007 at 8:31 am
This blew me away. Ours went up almost 7000% (yes, seven thousand). From just under 1300 to over 90,000. I guess since our site is so focused on Google we have a ton of Google Homepage folks or something. In any case, I enjoy following the stats MUCH more now…
February 18, 2007 at 8:41 am
I had a 90% increase. So were these people already subscribers, but not counted in the FeedBurner stats?
February 18, 2007 at 11:50 am
Yea I definately hit 666 readers after the update.
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/17/google-feedreaders-displaying-in-feedburner/
February 18, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Thank you for the information. I don’t use feedburner much but I will take a look at it. Your advice is good.
February 19, 2007 at 7:20 am
Interesting, thanks
February 26, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I noticed the same thing, my readers jumped by 105% in one day. Made me feel good : )
February 28, 2007 at 8:22 pm
I had about a 25% jump, not huge, but still nice to see.
March 9, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Nice to know that my stats are accurate now. Unfortunately they are still pathetically low
June 17, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Question on Creating a RSS site! I was thinking about allowing other webmaster to add a RSS feed from my site to their site.
I am new at this, but do I first need to use blog software and then buy rss feed software.
Not really sure what is the best method for increasing my PR.
Any help is appreciated.