Google Launches AdSense for Feeds- Breaks My Subscriber Count

August 15, 2008 · Comments

googlefail As I’m reading everywhere, people woke up to the ability to monetize their RSS feed with Google AdSense instead of FeedBurner (my friends from Chicago). Great, except on the day that you launched, I’ve magically lost about 3,000 RSS subscribers. Coincidence? I’m thinking no, but hey, maybe I’m just not being a good citizen about it.

**Update: and in other news, Technorati just shifted their numbers dramatically, too. I do check in on my Technorati ranking, and this morning, I was 377. Not bad, eh? But this afternoon, not far after the Google experience, I just looked in there:

technoratifail

What’s up with this? Part of me feels like Obi Wan Kenobi: “I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”

I want my 3,000 friends back, please. Don’t be the new definition of the failwhale.

King Failwhale has a Beer

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  • At least they only halved yours. Mine are gone completely and no one is replying to my message on the "help" board.
  • Oh no ... this is not good. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this. I for one will not put AdSense on my feeds. I think that many people will be annoyed with them.

    You must be getting slammed with traffic. Took forever for your blog to load.

    Charles Heflin
    Twitter @CharlesHeflin
  • Wow....they really did it this time! Messing with people's subscribers! And it's happening to more than one person yikes!
    Google and its spam always messing something up! I think that just like adsense, its just tacky and annoying! I agree with Charles on the the slow site loading! You must be swamped!
  • Could it be - and this is just speculation, Chris - that with the new system stricter rules for what actually constitutes a subscriber were implemented (or somehow the tracking changed), lowering the numbers?
  • I lost 20% of my subscribers overnight, boo!
  • Normally I try to add to the original thought when I comment, but in this case, well, Dude, that sucks.

    Nothing like fixing things that are not broken, and breaking them in the process.

    Hope that is just a glitch with the switch. (rhyme unintentional)

    Noe I am going to check my stats.
  • At one point yesterday my subscriber count went to zero, and although I now show subscribers again, I lost quite a few. I do NOT have ads on my feed at this time, so I wonder what happened. My post from this morning never turned into a feed either...
  • We lost an even greater percentage on the HubSpot blog. We were over 4000, and today it is showing at under 2500. Supposedly it is not counting all the people subscribed by Google Reader, which is a big number.

    Feedburner is not a business class service, like many free/web2.0 apps (as we recently learned with a multi-hour Gmail outage) and we all know about Twitter...
  • I lost close to half my subscribers overnight!

    crap.
  • I also don't have ads on my feeds, but lost about 33% in a growing-traffic and stumble-full week.

    I started to worry that I did or said something recently that made a bunch of people annoyed or offended. Or that a recent post I've been editing and re-editing was showing up over and over in other peoples feeds. (But I'm subscribed to my own feed and didn't see it, so figured that that was paranoia)

    Thank you for mentioning it. It's like a global Google Gaslight treatment!
  • I lost 1/3 of my subscribers as well -- lost a good 100! not cool =(
  • Shoot! Me too! I lost about a third (31%) of my subscribers. I wonder if it was a separate update and the numbers are more accurate...or just a huge fail.

    Thanks for aggregating some of our experiences here, hopefully we can get an explanation soon.
  • We had a couple of clients call who noticed this and weren't amused, we lost a few off feedburner as well...one can only hope a glitch?
  • I lost most of my subscribers too. Sigh.
  • This is too frustrating ... while my subscriber list is quite small in comparison to most here - I still would like to keep them! Bottom line, I lost everyone Monday morning, got them back Monday evening and now lost half of them again today. Now sitting here wondering ... can I trust the data I see on Feedburner at any given point? What's real? What can I count on?
  • Yep .. we lost some too. About 35% on onedegree.ca; almost 50% on mynameiskate.ca And we're not using the feedburner ads.

    I think Google must be having a major shift in a lot of areas. A few sites I have that had been getting page 1 keyword ranks and PR's of 5 or 6 have been kicked out of Google or dropped to about page 10 of ranks plus now have PR's of 0.

    Is it the Apocalypse? Is the world shifting? Haven't even bothered to check Technorati - am just starting my Friday happy hour much much earlier.
  • One of my feeds went from 12795 to 217.
  • I "lost" half of my subscribers as well, but unfortunately this has happened before, and they will probably be back tomorrow. Well, that's what I hope.

    As for Feedburner being here in Chicago, from what I hear on the mean streets of the Windy City most all have either left the company or moved to the GooglePlex. Most of Google's office here in Chicago is sales.

    mp/m
  • Didn't FeedBurner just make a change that reduced feed amounts? I saw the announcement in passing, but ignored it because I don't use FeedBurner.
  • I have been fed up with Technorati for years; seems like it's more hassle than it's worth to use it. So why do I keep using it in the vague hope that everything will magically get fixed? I wish there was a one-size-fits-all system that actually works consistently. -Laura, co-founder HeBlogsSheBlogs.com
  • What about RSS feed on ordinary websites? is it just for blogs? I'm saying for mycutegalaxy! A social networking, if it can be implemented on user profiles?
  • We did not implement AdSense on our feeds. Hate 'em.

    I checked our subscriber counts this morning on 5 blogs ... all show ZERO subscribers ... we lost em all.

    This has to be a glitch because though we show zero subscribers I still receive our feeds and so does a few other people that I spot checked with.

    Charles Heflin
    Twitter @CharlesHeflin
  • So FeedBurner is still busted (or I'm still down about 2500 subs, or they changed something).

    Technorati is still busted (or I dropped 900 points).

    AdAge 150 dropped me down to 63 (probably based on Technorati).

    If this were a numbers game, and sometimes it is, this would bug me.

    What it does instead is incent me to do things from other measures.
  • Good stuff adsense for feeds.
  • Waiting for that thing since started worket with Adsense.
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