Nothing in blogging can compare to the feeling of gaining a couple more RSS subscribers each day… or the feeling of losing the ones that you gain the next day. An interesting comment I observed yesterday was one from Adam Pieniazek (who blogs over at AdamPieniazek.com surprisingly 
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My subscriber count looks intact but I do see it fluctuate a lot from day to day on a regular basis (e.g. it’ll move up and down up and down with seemingly no real pattern).
What Adam and many bloggers experience on a daily basis is the effects of their subscribers. The Feedburner Feedcount stats all depend on who tunes in with their RSS readers. Basically meaning that if one subscriber only tunes in every Saturday, they’ll have +1 for the day of Saturday but lose that +1 every other day. So that “fluctuation” is just when more or less people tune into his content.
Personally I would just use Feedburner’s Feedcount as a rough estimate of how many real subscribers you actually have. To the delight of most people, you may have more than you think 
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6 Comments
Feed burner Feed count stats though it fluctuates on day today basis , it gives a clear picture about the performance of your blog. I have noticed that in the last six months, my feed count average increase is 10 every month.
OldSailor’s last blog post..Surface Preparation of Ships Pipelines made Easy for Painting
Thanks for this explanation. I could never figure out why the stats varied so much, and it seemed unlikely that people were routinely unsubscribing. This makes way more sense.
I always thought that’s why the feedburner count jumped up and down so much but thanks for confirming Brad. It’d be nice if they offered a running total of unique feed hits over the last week; that way we’d be able to more accurately judge how many subscribers we all have. As for my domain name, well someone has to blog there, it might as well be me!
Adam Pieniazek’s last blog post..Casting Call for New Bruce Willis Film, The Surrogates
@ OldSailor - +10/Month is never something to be ashamed of.. Obviously people like you content so keep it up!
@ Charlotte – I’m glad I could help
@ Adam – That would be a great feature to have inside of Feedburner, something like a “Average” subscriptions per week. Good explanation about the domain name xD
I know feedburner has an average subs per week stat in there somewhere…more of a total number of unique IPs that accessed your feed over a week. I actually tried sending them an e-mail to suggest the feature (it seems they already use unique IPs to calculate the feed count) but I’m struggling with a proper way to contact them, best I could find is an advertiser contact form…I’ll give it a shot though.
Adam Pieniazek’s last blog post..Casting Call for New Bruce Willis Film, The Surrogates
Apparently I have 5 whole RSS subscribers. Hope that increases. Perhaps I should put up a logo advertising it.
Luke’s last blog post..Meditate, You Big Jerk!