Growing Faster than TechCrunch – Thank You, Netvibes
Blogging, Humor June 1st, 2006
Don’t worry, dear reader, TechCrunch is still doing OK – their Feedburner subscription base grew almost 100% overnight. But it pales in comparison to my 2.5million % growth rate … yes, I went from 200 or so to 51k. Jeff Clavier did quite well, too, at 56k, but hey Jeff, I am catching up! 
OK, now that I had my coffee and am awake (?), let’s look at what really happened.
The culprit is clearly Netvibes – or to be precise, I don’t know if the error is on the Netvibes or Feedburner side, but clearly the Netvibes numbers are solely responsible for the inflated stats. The “fluff factor” is not a multiplier, they simply appear to have added a base of 50K or so to all statistics.
Hm… perhaps it’s not a glitch, it’s a “feature”, since NetVibes just installed an upgrade. 
Hey Netvibes (or Feedburner?), I hope I get a “finder’s fee” for pointing this out: when you fix this, could you please leave my base at… say at a tiny 10K bonus level… I promise I won’t tell. 
Related posts:
- FeedBurner’s “-blogger_feel_good” option
- 50,887 readers can’t be wrong
- Umm…Hello Netvibes Users?
- Feedburner Explains
Tags: blogs, blogging, feedburner, netvibes, techcrunch, zoliblog
Zoli Erdos
Hi Zoli -
We report whatever number is reported to us by centralized services; we’ve contacted them to let them know about the issue and it should be resolved moving forward. Sorry that your subscriber number will go down.
–Rick
FeedBurner
Wow, Rick, that was probably the fastest comment I ever received:-)
I suspected the gltich was on the sending end, especially as it coincides with their upgrade. Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted .. perhaps I should quickly sell ad space while it’s still there
)
Ah, that’s the problem. I was wondering how my feeds shot up by 50K when the traffic stayed steady.
Ahhh, that Strawberry White Chocolate Mousse looks mouthwatering rigth now, after lunch
FYI, we manually scrubbed our database for the affected feeds, and Netvibes confirms that their user agent has returned to normal… hopefully that resolves any issues!
–Rick
Was there an issue here? I can deal with 50K readers
(But thanks, anyway)
[...] time I beat TechCrunch was in July 2006: …their Feedburner subscription base grew almost 100% overnight. But it [...]