If you’ve logged into Feedburner recently you will see a notice asking you to move your account to Google. Ultimately you have no choice as they want all accounts transferred to Google by 28 February, 2009.
Unfortunately this has been an incredibly uncomfortable process for most users in the last week because the move has resulted in a significant drop of subscriber numbers. For example, subscriber numbers on The Edublogger dropped 50 % and 70 % on my personal blog. Larry Ferralzzo experienced similar and asked if I could write a post to explain what’s happening.
You will see on the Feedburner Known Issues and Workarounds for 23 January:
Publishers who have recently moved to Google Accounts may have noticed a significant drop in reported subscriber stats for all feeds. We are actively investigating this issue. We have identified a likely cause and will hopefully have more information on a resolution shortly. Hang in there, folks.
They were late in reporting this issue as I noticed the problem on 18 January and saw numerous posts in their help forum discussing the issue.
Your subscriber number hasn’t actually dropped, it is just that Feedburner hasn’t been accurately recording your number of readers. Ironically the problem relates to Google Fetchfeed subscribers not being included in reporting of your subscriber numbers. How much your subscriber number dropped depends on how many of your subscribers use Google Reader.
Good news is your subscribers didn’t stop receiving your feed from Feedburner. Better still perhaps Googles fixed the problem as my subscriber numbers returned to normal today. However a few people are reporting “There was a problem retrieving the feed: Error getting URL: 502 – Bad Gateway” when they’ve tried to move their account.
At present, if you want to monitor how many people subscribe to your blog, Feedburner is still the best option. Here’s how to:
- Adding a RSS Feed From Feedburner To Your Blog
- How To Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog
- Redirect Your Blog Feed To Feedburner
But as I’ve highlighted before make sure you ALWAYS subscribe to your own posts, ideally in both Google Reader and Bloglines, and by email, so you can spot immediately ANY issues fetching your feed.
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