Whats the deal with Feedburner numbers?

[akdiver]

I have recently launched a blog (1 month old) and I dont get the number of subscriptions that feedburner displays. I have heard it is not very accurate but so far it has been 2 then went to 5 for a day and back to 2 for a couple of weeks then up to 8 for a day then back to 2 again and now it is 13 which I think is a fair reflection atm.

Is it anything I have done in setting it up or is this normal behaviour for feedburner it is very frustrating.

[Dan Grossman]

That's normal behavior. Think about it. You don't keep a record of who subscribed to and unsubscribed from your feed like a newsletter. You can only track every subscriber by who's downloading your feed that day.

If some of your subscribers read from work, you lose them on the weekends and your count drops. If some of your subscribers don't leave their feed readers open all the time, you lose them some days and gain them back when they reopen the reader. Same for 'web desktops' with RSS readers that they don't visit every day. It's always going to fluctuate, although the pattern will be more regular once you have thousands of readers.