April 1st Feedburner Subscriber Drop

Maybe you noticed that around April 1st your feedburner subscribers dropped—a lot. In our case 3/5ths of our subscribers abandoned us. Naturally I believed this to be a glitch and ignored it. Two days later I can firmly say that we’re still reading way below par.

On the advice of DavidF I checked out Google blog search and eventually found a post on the Feedburner help forum where MattS explained:

“If you compare individual days (e.g., March 31 vs. April 1) in Analyze > Feed Stats > Subscribers, I’m guessing most of the missing subscribers are from Google Feedfetcher. We’ve notified that team of the temporary drop in subscribers we’re seeing reported by them and will work with them to resolve the issue.”

We checked this out and sure enough feedfetcher registered all of 1 subscriber for April 1st.

So have no fear, bloggers. The internet does not hate you.