Mid last week a lot of blog owners saw their RSS subscribers count drastically decrease. I had seen this before but it never lasted more then a day (that i saw). I was surprised to see the issue still going on several days later as it started to pop up on forums, blogs, and on some Google Groups that Feedburner was no longer showing your Aweber Blog Broadcast Subscribers.
I talked to a friend who works at Feedburner and he said he was not sure the exact reason they stopped showing but that Feedburner in general was cleaning up questionable services that might not be reporting properly.
I think this was kind of funny as seeing as how they just started reporting friendfinder… anyway…
Earlier today Aweber’s CEO responded to me and John Chow’s tweets on Twitter:
I do hope its a temporary glitch. If its permanent it would be a huge blow to Aweber.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
You did implement the new disclaimer, brilliant.
It seems to me that most of the stats you see on sites are not accurate. If you look at the difference between the site stats on your host vs the stats shown in Google analytics vs the stats shown in your adwords account none of them match up.
Really you don’t need to bother with stats except that they should be trending upwards and all your stats should agree with that. The raw numbers don’t matter.
The difference between your server-side stats and something like Google Analytics isn’t accuracy, but what they’re measuring. Your server-side stats are counting all of the spiders, spambots, etc that access your site, whereas client-side based stats only count views that have JavaScript enabled.
I agree that the absolute numbers are basically meaningless and the trend is what matters.
Brent I agree with what you are saying.
Rumors blown way out of proportion.
We know exactly what the problem is and it’s a simple technical change that needs to be updated with Feedburner. It has nothing to do with any questionable services being removed by Feedburner.
think this was kind of funny as seeing as how they just started reporting friendfinder
Thanks for this info, you just saved me from having to scour the web to try to figure out what was going wrong with feedburner.
Yes, thanks for the info. I love being on the ins on this sort of knowledge so when someone is like ‘My Feeds are WAYYY down’ I can help em
Thanks for updating us on this, you saved me some precious time researching the issue.
My Blog counter has dropped from 3k to 1.1k ..lol – I hope this is temp problem & will get resolved soon.
As you said Shoe, would be a big blow on Aweber. I sincerely hope that it is just a temporary problem and that both interested parties will get this issue straighten out soon.
Why would it be a blow to aweber? Seems like their service is very useful and not used solely to boost your feedburner numbers.
you think wrong
That is a HUGE thing that seperates them much better services for email marketing.
cuz aweber is the only or one of the only esps that will boost your feedburner subscriber count with people who have not requested to subscribe to your feed count. many refuse to offer this service because they do not want to be associated with something like that. and i’ve talked to them about it. personally, i think boosting your numbers on feedburner, twitter, etc regardless of accuracy is good marketing.
They are good but they are not the only one.
dropping aweber stats made a huge difference on my site as I use aweber for all my form based subscriptions.
Its good to hear though that they are working on this … or this a coverup? What if feedburner never shows aeber stats again?? Will that make you move away from aweber?
Here is the twitter page for discussion – https://twitter.com/coolwebdev/status/2392736974
I was wondering why your and John Chow’s susbcriber count dropped dramatically. Now i know.
That would suck if FeedBurner stopped including the Aweber susbcriber count.
I hope they fix this quickly, my numbers are definitely down. They’ve always been down though!
I hope it all works out as aWeber has a really great service. (Although Tom, you could make a couple cheaper tiers for the advanced reporting
I for one am still waiting to see what google will do to start improving feedburner, it used to be so cutting edge. Seems like it has gotten pretty stale since google picked them up. But people are starting to get away for RSS readers and back to email, better control of the conversation (= better conversion)
i dont use aweber…
How come I didn’t notice a thing…
Yeah it happens some time when you are really busy in other important things.
No wonder I saw this RSS feed count goes up and down so much lately.
Ever since Google took over Feedburner the service has been horrible. Myself, and many others, posted in the help forum that our subscriber numbers recently dropped dramatically. I’m talking that I supposedly lost 15,000 over just a few days for one feed and around 5,000 on another. No one at Google has even bothered to reply to our messages. Yeah, great customer service. Now, I don’t use Aweber, so the issue that you blogged about can’t be connected to my skewed numbers. So Shoe, since you seem to be able to get Google to give you the time of day about Feedburner issues, maybe you could help out by bringing this additional problem to their attention.
They know about this but I think they have more other important works.
I do not know what Google upto … feedburner is certainly an important tool and this is assets of every webmaster.
If they know about it, then why haven’t they replied in the support forum and why hasn’t mention been made on the FeedBurner Status blog. You would think that they would at least acknowledge the problem.
Some time big corporates will never accept their problems as that can ruin their credibility as well.
Remember there were huge ups and down in adsense (clicks are not showing some time impression were not showing) but they did not accept it first. When they have fixed it that post on their blogs.
Twitter is just the best way to keep your finger on the pulse and get a quick answer too! I wonder how much emailing is already being replaced by twitter (and IM services too, for that matter). In the world of overflowing inboxes we inhabit, twitter is definitely the best shortcut!
Twitter is like jungle which spread current fire very fast and cover everyone who came in the contact.
So far twitter is rocking one.
All stats should be back to normal. The problem was resolved on Monday and took about 24 hours for Feedburner counters to normalize again.
They are back to normal. Greg Ellison
Shoemoney would you stop using aweber if feedburner drop them in the future?
Both feedburner and aweber are important services. Both has maintained high quality in their service, though off late feedburner has dropped after their acquisition by Google (which I think is normal with every acquisition and should be up and better than earlier). So if there was a problem in any of them, then it is in the best interest of everybody that it get resolved as soon as possible.
Looks like everything is back to normal now.
It isn’t back to normal on my account.
Thanks for sharing this Jeremy. Any updates?
I had used aweber trail version but not very effective.
I’ve heard of several people having problems with AWeber recently too, coincidence??
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