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Don’t Panic: No, Everyone Didn’t Just Unsubscribe From The Internet

My feedburner numbers went down by more than half overnight. I considered spending the day crying in a corner, feeling abandoned and alone, wondering where it all went wrong, but first I thought I’d check a few other sites. Their numbers went down by around half as well.

Did half the population unsubscribe from the internet all of once? Nah, Google Reader just didn’t report numbers for yesterday. Compare my Friday subscription numbers:

Feedburner Stats Friday

to Saturday’s:

Feedburner Stats Saturday

Everything looks about the same, except that those 511 subscribers from “Feedfetcher” are conspicuously absent. Reader reports numbers by including them in the request when it grabs a feed. Likely it didn’t include those numbers with requests yesterday due to some kind of a glitch. I’m sure it’ll be fixed soon. Occasional non-reporting of numbers by feed readers is one of the reasons Feedburner numbers tend to fluctuate.

(Note My Yahoo didn’t report numbers for Friday, but since I apparently don’t have many readers on My Yahoo, I didn’t notice.)

Or maybe there’s a “Google Reader subscribers unite in unsubscribing from the internet!” movement, but I’ll give it a few days before heading to that corner with my ocean of lonely tears.

Update: Feedburner has confirmed this as well.