Wordpress.com users noticed significant drop in their feed subscriber counts by as much as 75%. This is due to the reason that Wordpress.com guys updated the code to remove duplicate counts caused by multiple queries from similar sources.
Your feed stats may have dropped significantly today. They may also have been very erratic over the past few weeks. You should find them more stable now. Let me explain.
When a large service such as Netvibes requests your feed, their request includes the number subscribers they are servicing for your feed. They do this by including something like “30 subscribers” in the request. Your feed stats are the sum of all of these.
In the months since we launched Feed Stats, aggregators have experienced explosive growth. When a service like Netvibes gets very large they start needing lots of machines to do the work, so these requests may start arriving from different machines. There may be as many as ten machines each reporting “30 subscribers” which makes it seem as though there were 300 subscribers. This was making your feed stats report a falsly high number of subscribers.
…A few minutes ago I updated the code to try to weed out the duplicates while respecting enterprise aggregators. Your feed stats may drop as a result. They may even crash. Unfortunately we cannot apply this change retroactively. On the bright side, this change means your feed stats will be more stable and accurate from now on. - Wordpress
It will surely help to show genuine and accurate feed counts for wordpress blogs, but is a big shock for bloggers to know that they are not as popular as they thought.
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