Just How Trustworrthy Are the Kindle Blog Reports?

The daily blog report didn't update at all yesterday. Today, it's updated, and the numbers are very strange.

I know they've got the fine print at the bottom of the report "Subscription activity shown is based on snapshot of past data and may not match the final monthly subscriptions report against which payments are made due to factors such as system latency, cancellations and billing issues."

But that doesn't explain how the numbers could have changed as they've done.

Two days ago my Encyclopedia Asimova subscriptions were 0 - 8. Today, they are 0 -13. Where did those extra 5 subscriptions come from since there was no intermediate subscriber step? My Seaborn oceanography blog now is at 6-47, instead of 7-31 just two days ago.

Well, I just hope I can trust the numbers that are there today.

Why is this so puzzling? Because the Kindle books you sell on Amazon - that report is updated instantaneously. And if you're an associate - as I am - and someone buys a book from your site using that link- that report is updated daily and never misses.

So I don't really understand why the Kindle reports are different, except they must be all sorted from a different place - somewhere in India, I have no doubt, and they were cheap on the software so everything has to be inititated by hand or something. Otherwise why would reports be a whole day late, and then show such skewed data? (In particular since if you go to each blog's subscription page, most of 'em haven't moved at all.)

But again, that's a change, too. It used to be that if you put up a new blog, as soon as it became active, and you subscribed to it just to make sure the feed worked, etc., within two hours that subscription would show up on your subscription page.

But the last few times I've done it (for blogs I thought were failures...but then, I was trusting the reports to be accurate...now I regret having abandoned them so soon!) that subscription never shows up.

As a blog reviewer of other blogs, I subscribe to three or four blogs every other day, and I've gone back to a few of those two weeks later and the fact that they had at least one subscription has not registered, there are no numbers at all.

Well, I've ranted about this probably at least once or twice a month for the last two months...but today the discrepancy between two days worth of reports over three days is really shocking. My subscriptions are up, up, up according to today's report, so I hope this is the one that's accurate.

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Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report