This is now Day #9 of the latest zero subscribers issue. On my feed,
the number has never been refreshed before noon EST, during that time
and in some cases has taken until 6PM.
Ultimately, I don't really need to know my subscriber numbers every
moment. But I certainly would never use the widget to show them on my
site, and I suspect people have begun removing them from their sites
with these latest problems.
It's ironic, people told me when I started my 'cast a few months ago
that libsyn (my feed host) stats sucked and were unreliable so I
should use feedburner. The truth has been the opposite - libsyn has
had a few problems but always been very good at communicating when
they have.
It's getting tempting to just drop the few hours of programming time
to set up my own RSS pointing to my libsyn files and write a program
to parse my logfiles to get what feedburner is getting for
"Subscriber" numbers. It's not rocket science. But I am aware that
such a course of action requires more ongoing work on my part to
maintain, and I'd rather focus on my podcast. Not mention that I
already have subscribers and I don't want to lose hem or have to have
multiple feeds. I've said before that I would pay a little bit each
month for a reliable feedburner service with actual professional
support.
Now, I know feedburner offers a lot more than just stats and a
redirected feed. But I suspect that most of the users are primarily
using those two features. Perhaps the reason that no competitors have
come along is that there is little money in it. Who knows.
Really, Google and Feedburner should be embarrassed at the stats
issues and the lackadaisical support. Free or not, this kind of stuff
hurts the Google image. I can't quite understand the mentality behind
it. And while I can understand that the parent company may not be
allocating enough resources to feedburner to fix all the issues, at a
minimum you should post status updates every day. It may be painful
to have to repeatedly acknowledge either that you're not working on it
or that it's not fixed yet, but it goes a long way towards serving
your customers.