How does feedburner count subscribers?

[Chris]

Any idea how feedburner counts subscribers? Reads, clicks, requests?

Its odd cause my numbers go up and down daily.

[Cutter]

I'm not sure, I was talking to Jon about this exact same thing a while ago.

[Emancipator]

good question chris. Mine fluctuates by hundreds every single day. I just recently started using the subscription service via email example http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_9519.html to notify folks when i post new contests on my site which is really often. Saves me doing a newsletter.

[Chris]

Ya, I'm using the email thing for a new project too. I set it up yesterday, signed up last night, but noticed I didn't get counted as a subscriber until an email actually went out.

[stymiee]

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers is calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers and aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.