Hello readers and bloggers, sometime did you think about why your feedburner’s subscribers counter change suddenly? or why a day it shows 100 and the next one shows 80? you probably have the wrong idea about what this counter really shows. I found this information by looking in the feedburner dashboard, there is a “i” of information beside the statistics in your Feed Stats Dashboard. It is something like this:

So what’s about this counter? what it really shows?

Basically this counter shows the number of subscribers you got during the last day. This mean that the number that you see there, is the number of subscribers you got yesterday, and it’s delayed by a day so really you can see tomorrow how was your blog today. Thats the reason why when you are starting your blog, you see how this number variate a lot, from 2 to 30 and vice versa, because this number doesn’t shows the number of total subscribers to your blog.

Instead, if you choose in your dashboard a date range like “last 7 days” or “all time” this number will be the average number of subscribers for all of the days selected. This number provides a general understanding of the size of your subscriber base over a time period.

How this number is calculated ?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. The subscribers’ number is not computed for browsers or bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

What’s the reach ?

This is another factor related to the counter. Reach is the total number of people who have taken action ( viewed or clicked ) on the content in your feed. So if someone click over a link your counter will increase by 1.

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

Learning about…

I received this question by mail and I hope this post helps to understand the basics of the feed counter. A feedcounter is one of the widgets that you can’t miss in your blog, it gives an idea to your readers about how “popular” is your blog and also can give you a percentage about how many people visit your blog daily.