There has been a lot of buzz throughout the net this weekend as most people publishing RSS feeds saw dramatic increases in their subscriber numbers as reported by services such as FeedBurner.
The reason? Google finally started reporting subscriber numbers from their services. Yahoo, Bloglines, et. al., have been reporting this information for some time but Google has been a bit behind the times. Friday, they announced this was changing, and Saturday FeedBurner’s subscriber reporting was updated.
If you aren’t using a feed service, you can gauge your subscribers by quickly perusing your log file. The Google feed bot now reports subscribers when grabbing your feed, such as:
“Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 27 subscribers; feed-id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)”
Subscribers counts to my sites jumped from 20% -140%.