Find the Subscriber Count of a FeedBurner RSS Feed on a Given Day

You may remember the FeedBurner Chicklet hack that reveals the number of subscribers a particular feed has. We can extend the trick to get slightly more detailed statistics about any FeedBurner feed provided they have activated the FeedCount service.

To get started, you should know the name of FeedBurner feed which is generally written after the slash. For example, if the URL of the FeedBurner feed is feeds.feedburner.com/labnol, the feedname is labnol.

Case A: To get the latest subscriber count of a FeedBurner feed, type the following address in your Firefox browser. Alternatively, you can start notepad and paste this web address in the File->Open dialog.

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=labnol

You’ll see something like this:

<entry date=”2008-05-16″ circulation=”24460″ hits=”46621″ reach=”3491″/>

Circulation: The count of people who are subscribed to this feed.
Hits: The number of times that feed was requested by different clients on that day.
Reach: The number of people who viewed or clicked the content available in the feed.

Case B: If you like to know the number of feed subscribers on any particular day, just append the dates parameter to the above address. The date should be in the format yyyy-mm-dd.

In this example, lets see how many people subscribed to the labnol feed on April 1.

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=labnol&dates=2008-04-01

Case C: In this example, you’ll learn how to find the growth / decline in number of feed subscribers over a period of time. For this we need to append two dates to the URL - the start date and the end date.

For example, lets see how the feed circulation count changed during the first ten days of May 2008.

http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=labnol&dates=2008-05-01,2008-05-10

Remember to replace “labnol” with your own feed name.

For more details, check out the FeedBurner API and FeedBurner FAQ.