What happened? I had no idea. It’s normal for the number of my RSS subscribers to drop 10 readers at a time but for it to lose 65 readers overnight was weird. Since I don’t know what the reason was, I couldn’t do anything about so I thought to myself that I’d just wait until tomorrow and see what happens.

Later that afternoon, I got John Chow’s RSS feed via email and saw the title of his latest post – “How I Lost 4,993 RSS Subscribers Overnight“. I immediately knew that what ever reason he had for losing that much subscribers was the same reason I lost mine. From John’s post, I found out that the culprit was Google’s Feedfetcher and that it wasn’t showing the number of RSS subccribers using Google Reader. Btw, I’m sure John is happy that this didn’t happen during the RSS competition vs Shoemoney. Hehe

Though John Chow showed proof that the culprit was Google Feedfetcher, I still wasn’t sure and I wanted to confirm it so I decided to pay the Feedburner blog a visit and saw this Saturday Subscriber Count Drop?

If you saw your subscriber count drop precipitously in your Saturday, November 3rd summary from FeedBurner, the reason is that specific subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher were offline because this service was apparently out late with friends on Friday night, and well, it completely slept through Saturday. It appears to have rallied, however, and amid firm declarations of “I’m never doing that again”, Feedfetcher has started diligently reporting subscriber numbers to us, early this morning Pacific Time. FeedBurner publishers’ subscriber counts should be closer to what you’d normally expect starting with reports that will be available on Monday morning.

There ya go! That explains everything. Good to know that it’s just temporary and that things should be back to normal on Monday morning.

Anyone else got worried by the sudden drop of RSS subscribers n the Feedburner chicklet? What percentage of your total RSS subscribers use Google Reader? How about you, do you use Google Reader? Share your thoughts!