Big Spike In Feedburner Subscribers

I was at Feedburner approving an ad for my /Message feed, and I saw that the number of subscribers to the feed went up 700+ yesterday: a 34% increase in one day.

If anyone has an explanation, I would be interested. I wasn't dugg yesterday, was I? I wasn't involved in a public spat, or at least any that I know of. Maybe one of the new 700 will tell me what gives.

I also noted that Google Feedfetcher has become the leading RSS service pulling the feed, ahead of Netvibes and Bloglines. Last I looked, Bloglines was the leader.

[Update: Marjolein tipped me off that Feedburner started directly pulling the stats of Google Feedfetcher yesterday:

[from Google Noe Reporting Subscribers]

Starting with our Saturday February 17th subscriber reporting, FeedBurner publishers will be able to see how many Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers they have. (Thanks, Google!) This information will show up in tonight's subscriber reports (meaning that most of you will start to see the data on Saturday morning, U.S. Central Time).

What does this mean? This is one more data point to help you understand how many people have asked to receive your feed (aka "subscribers"). For those who are interested in the particulars, the number that Google is reporting is the total number of Google users who've subscribed to your feed in Reader or with Personalized Homepage.

Alvy also disclosed the impact of Google reporting, in the comments here.]

tags: feedburner, /message, feedburner+feed, subscriptions

Comments

[Alvy]

Feedburner just added the Google Reader and Google Personalized numbers, they didn't have them in the past, so all weblogs have received this kind of skipe.

Also, a week or two ago they also added My Yahoo.

More info on their blog:

http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/02/the_google_effect.php

[Jevon]

Mine had a jump of 40%. Weird.

[Nathan Gilliatt]

I saw a similar jump this morning. I wonder if they've found a way to reduce undercounting the web-based aggregators?

Here we go. From the FeedBurner blog: Google Now Reporting Subscribers

[Rick Klau]

Alvy and Nathan beat me to it: Google Reader just started reporting their subscriber numbers, so we're finally able to include Google's audience info in the overall subscriber report. It's had a huge impact on the identifiable audience across the board. Note that these aren't *new* subscribers, they're just subscribers whose numbers were previously unavailable to us.

Always nice to know how many people are out there, and congrats on building up such a sizable audience.

[Colin Henderson]

I am on wordpress hosted, and had a 700% increase yesterday. Based on today so far it looks like mine was a one day spike.

[Webomatica]

I saw a jump as well...

[Mark Evans]

Thanks for playing detective with the Feedburner subscriber mystery! My subscriber numbers jumped by 25%, making me think - at least for a moment - I had suddenly become an A-lister..:)

[Alan Keister]

I saw a jump of 100% in my stats too. I am also hosted on Wordpress. Much of mine seems to be from search results. That suggests Wordpress has made some big SEO improvements.