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October 6, 2007

Feedburner Bug, Or We More Than Doubled Our RSS Subscribers

Duncan Riley

65 comments »

feedburnerbug.jpg1,511,000: the number of subscribed RSS readers of TechCrunch, according to the Feedburner Widget as I type this post. Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m calling it a Feedburner bug.

Feedburner has had a long history of doing strange things with the subscriber counter, and TechCrunch’s readership (if the counter is to be believed) can fluctuate by over 50,000 readers from day to day, but I’ve never seen a 900,000 jump.

If you’ve just gained (or even lost) an extra hundred thousand readers, or perhaps even a million, let us know in the comments.

Update (MA): Occam’s Razor; Feedburner’s CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed it was a bug and that it will be fixed shortly.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 3:56 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:04 am

  2. BlueVerse

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:08 am

  3. BlueVerse

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:30 am

  4. Melodycode.com

    October 10th, 2007 at 3:56 am

  5. www.hadziaj.info » Blog Archive » Something is rotten in the counters of Feedburner.

    November 10th, 2007 at 10:37 am

Comments

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  1. Allen Stern

    October 6th, 2007 at 4:31 am

    LOL - I posted about it too:
    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....n-new-subs

    From my simple research, other sites appear about the same as the day previous.

  2. Rob Walters

    October 6th, 2007 at 4:41 am

    Our sites are all still the same as yesterday. :(

  3. N.Cauldwell

    October 6th, 2007 at 4:46 am

    The subscriber stats on my blog have often doubled from one day to the next without any posts being made, nor an increase in traffic. Today, I’m at my highest subscriber counter ever, which may be related to the issues on TechCrunch (fingers crossed it isn’t - I like subscribers!). I remember Read Write Web losing, and subsequently gaining, a third of its’ subscribers in a short space of time. I’m surprised we haven’t seen much more fuss over this (unless I’ve missed it all) - Google Analytics would’ve been blasted over bugs like this.

  4. Allen Stern

    October 6th, 2007 at 4:49 am

    The important thing to remember as I wrote about before is that rss subs 2007 = hits 1996. Any marketer who makes marketing decisions based on subs alone has a fool for a client.

    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....al-to-hits

  5. Amit

    October 6th, 2007 at 4:50 am

    congrats :P

  6. darkripper

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:02 am

    Using a well known Feedburner problem, this small app allows to pump feedburner stats.

  7. Dario Salvelli

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    There is a pretty joke Italian tool:

    http://www.deeario.it/Tessarolizr.htm

  8. Guillaume

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:20 am

    This is not a but. Me and my million friends registered yesterday. So gratz Techcrunch!

  9. Juan Luis

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:25 am

    If it´s a bug,normally the origin is the user agent reporting Feedburner the subscribers.
    Allready happened and was always for the same reason.
    I remember one of them when everyone got a 50,866 subscription boost, because of a bug in Netvibes

    http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=4712

  10. TDavid

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:38 am

    No change on the sites we have using it.

  11. Amit Agarwal

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:49 am

    I would not blame FeedBurner - the fault is generally with the different online RSS readers (and bots) that are reporting subscriber numbers to FeedBurner.

    You can actually find the culprit through your FeedBurner dashboard - just compare the latest subscriber details with that of last week.

  12. Ollie Parsley

    October 6th, 2007 at 5:50 am

    Mine has pretty much stayed the same. Tomorrow it will go down anyway as they always do at the weekend. We shall see how TC does!

  13. Evangelist

    October 6th, 2007 at 6:07 am

    I checked a couple of my blogs and sites, count remains quite the same with the change as much as doubled.

  14. sriram

    October 6th, 2007 at 6:14 am

    mine is still the same

  15. Allen Stern

    October 6th, 2007 at 6:28 am

    #12 Amit - I agree with what you said and with the number of exclusives TC has, it could very well be one of them.

    #10 - that’s interesting - bloglines you can trick :)

  16. Techmine

    October 6th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    if feedburner is also responsible for pushing feeds to our readers then it has become slow too. Often I see posts getting delayed. I dont know whats the issue. Is it my google reader problem?

  17. Frank

    October 6th, 2007 at 7:12 am

    @Duncan: Some german bloggers including Robert Basic also report strange counting issues these days (even a longer time). Their problem seems to be related to a my yahoo counting bug. Unfortunately Feedburner doesn’t respond to support tasks lately. Seems like to google deal brought the chaos in there ;)

  18. Giovy

    October 6th, 2007 at 7:46 am

    The Techcrunch problem is caused by this: http://www.deeario.it/Tessarolizr.htm
    An italian “joke” (mmmm…. let’s call it “joke”, but is a stupid one) that exploit a FB bug to pimp the subscribers of any FB feed…

  19. Ray Renteria

    October 6th, 2007 at 7:49 am

    We’ve been seeing steady growth and yesterday’s growth was consistent with our trend.

    I hope that congratulations are in order.

    –Ray

  20. Daniele Simonin

    October 6th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    This is the “bug”: http://read.melodycode.com/new.....r_bug.html

    Tessorolizr is the exploit that uses that bug :)

    Simple spoofing.

  21. Dima

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:30 am

    I was surprised first time, when my feedburner subscribers count got zero. But it happens periodically =) and I dont’ pay any attention to 20% fluctuations…

  22. Jennifer Lee

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    My friend had been telling me about how I’d have double the amount of readers and then when I’d go to check it’d be the same. So naturally I’d think he was CRAZY, he just sent me the link to prove his sanity. haha!

  23. Sachin Jain

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:35 am

    My count increased by 1.
    :)

  24. Bjorn Tipling

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:46 am

    My read count doubled as well. It jumped to two from one. Actually I lie, nobody reads my blog, probably because I don’t ever write anything on it.

  25. Chris Jacobson

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    A bug in FeedBurner? Never! :p

    My count is up by 15 since yesterday. Bug or not, I’m happy. :)

  26. ufucuk

    October 6th, 2007 at 9:59 am

    bug or not, it must be grea to see for you 1.500.000 people read feeds :)

  27. thesavvyboomer

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    First time I’ve looked at them in a month. During that time they decreased by 1/2 over 2 days and then more than doubled over 2 days this week. That’s why I seldom look at them. They’re useless.

  28. Giovy

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    Please, read the comments #19 & 21!!!!

  29. Tony Siino

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:22 am

    Read Tessarolizr (in english).

  30. Neil Sandhu

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Our feed counts have been all over the map in the last few days as well

  31. GoogTube

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:33 am

    My subscribers have dropped by about 300 on what it was yesterday, But i only have about 1700 subscribers so it’s probably normal fluctuations and not a result of this bug.

  32. Richard Jalichandra

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Hiya..Even my stats have doubled.

    I had one subscriber, and today I am shocked to see it doubled!

  33. alfonso escamilla

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Well, the fact that someone like myself that is in Midland, Texas found TC and is now addicted may have caused the counter to rise. Midland, Texas worth 900,000 points Menlo Park worth 1 full point.

  34. Abhishek Daaga

    October 6th, 2007 at 10:55 am

    This really surprises me.. as nothing changed in my RSS it is the same just a couple of readers are added…

  35. Kevin

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:06 am

    No change for us!

    So congrats Techcrunch ;-)

  36. Daniel Scocco

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:06 am

    The fluctuations are normal, and here is the reason: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/m.....ctuations/

    Such a big spike seems abnormal, though. I think it should get fixed naturally in a couple of days at most.

  37. Dick Costolo

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:13 am

    Definitely was a FeedBurner bug. Tomorrow’s numbers based on today’s data should be back earthward a bit to the existing trendline. Sorry for the excitement.

  38. Matt

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    Don’t ask why. Take the 1.5 mil figure and shop the site ASAP. Just tell the acquiror you just implemented a successful “forward to a friend” campaign if they probe.

  39. Steve Ballmer

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:45 am

    Bug!

  40. phenom

    October 6th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    wow, that is a significant increase in number of subscriber after China banning RSS feeds.
    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

  41. Sven

    October 6th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    Must be via my personalized page on http://www.undiq.mobi/

  42. Alex

    October 6th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

    Duncan said: …..”Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m calling it a Feedburner bug.”

    I say: Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m taking this opportunity to lock in long term contracts with my advertisers. lol

    :)

  43. Xavier

    October 6th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    600,000 subscribers is still pretty damn impressive.

  44. Matt

    October 6th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    advertisers don’t care about one’s feedburner reader count… hehehe… it’s pretty common (As has been exhausted in these comments) for feedburner to “lie” essentially. It’s not an accepted form of “hard stats” that advertisers want to see or pay a premium for. So let’s let those tired jokes start to whittle down now, eh? the bug has been plenty explained… enough so to mandate an update to the post i would say.

    @ duncan: you yourself said it was all but certainly a bug, so how about an update to the post now that you know what caused it (or at least have a window into the vulnerability)… people have a hard time reading all the comments to find the real story, and as much as i loathe updates to blog posts this one is in order. :)

  45. Procionegobbo

    October 6th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    It’s not so difficult to understand: it is an exploit.
    Try to read Tessarolizr.

  46. patricia

    October 6th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    Or maybe it just caught up to all the past subscribers it hadn’t added yet.

  47. JasonM

    October 6th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

    600,000 is pretty good only last year when I subscribed it was around 61,000 subscribers.

  48. Prathik R M

    October 6th, 2007 at 11:19 pm

    ;) It’s fixed now.. 600k visitors.. BTW how did you start promoting this site. Share some tips..

  49. FG

    October 7th, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Guys read the comments before adding more speculations!

    This behavior is caused by exploiting a Feedburner feature described moth ago here: http://read.melodycode.com/new.....r_bug.html.

    Last week a bunch of italian bloggers created a funny, simple web application to attract the attention to a wider audience on this problem. This application is desribed here in enligsh: http://www.deeario.it/2007/10/.....n-english/.

    If everyone can increase the number of suscribers as easy as shown there, can we really trust this numbers? Are we really sure anyone used this exploit before?

    I think Feedburner should deliver an official statement about this!

  50. manfrys

    October 7th, 2007 at 1:36 am

    .. take a look: http://www.deeario.it/Tessarolizr.htm

  51. Napolux

    October 7th, 2007 at 1:47 am

    With Tessarolizr I got 1 MILLION READERS yesterday… :P

    It’s just a joke, but it’s kinda funny that Feedburner didn’t solve this bug (it came out about 6 months ago)

  52. terronista

    October 7th, 2007 at 1:58 am

    The bug was fixed!

  53. Tony Siino

    October 7th, 2007 at 5:32 am

    Fixed? Not so sure…

  54. itechcrunch.cn

    October 7th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    i can not submit my site:http://itechcrunch.cn/ to feedburner,i donnot know why.so i go to feedsky,it is good.

  55. George S

    October 7th, 2007 at 10:01 am

    So there’s where my 900,000 feeds went!

  56. Dan Schawbel

    October 7th, 2007 at 11:19 am

    No change here.

  57. Aruni Gunasegaram

    October 7th, 2007 at 6:32 pm

    Um. I only wish by blog reader stats would fluctuate 50,000 each day. I’ve seen mine fluctuate 5 to 10 readers a day but given my readership is significantly less than Tech Crunch’s I doubt it’s related to a bug.

  58. Steve Ballmer

    October 7th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    Bug! Bug!
    Bug!
    Bug!
    It’s a Bug!
    It’s on a linux server, BUG!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  59. Daniele Simonin

    October 10th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    This bug is patched but there is another similar bug ;)
    More info: http://read.melodycode.com/new.....mmmni.html

    The bug is not public ’cause i’m waiting a reply from FeedBurner Support, but there is the pic that demonstrate that it works.

    Stay tuned ;)

  60. Money Blurbs

    October 19th, 2007 at 5:13 am

    I agree with Amit on the count jump. When you provide integrated service, you got to rely on the data fed from other subscribers as well.

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