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.

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Reader's Comments

  1. Anonymous | June 1st, 2006 at 9:15 am

    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

  2. Anonymous | June 1st, 2006 at 9:24 am

    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 :-))

  3. Anonymous | June 1st, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    Ah, that’s the problem. I was wondering how my feeds shot up by 50K when the traffic stayed steady.

  4. Anonymous | June 1st, 2006 at 5:27 pm

    Ahhh, that Strawberry White Chocolate Mousse looks mouthwatering rigth now, after lunch :-)

  5. Anonymous | June 2nd, 2006 at 12:12 am

    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

  6. Anonymous | June 2nd, 2006 at 12:21 am

    Was there an issue here? I can deal with 50K readers :-)
    (But thanks, anyway)

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