The fine folks over at theNEXTweb has published a video showcasing just how easy it is to manipulate your subscriber numbers in FeedBurner.
Apparently, it’s as easy as creating an OPML file, placing your FeedBurner URL into the file about 1,000 times or however many new subscribers you want, then importing this OPML file into Netvibes. Each module in NetVibes which loads your RSS feed will count as an RSS Subscriber to FeedBurner.
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.
This is definitely not the way to go about increasing your RSS numbers. However, I’m willing to bet that there are a few bloggers out their who will take advantage of this opportunity. I’m pretty sure, thanks to this video highlighting the hack that Google/FeedBurner will do something about this in the not to distant future. Once that happens, keep an eye out on your favorite blogs and see if their RSS subscriber count goes downhill.
I strongly recommend staying away from this hack. Instead, organically grow your subscriber count. If you need a jump start on how to do that, check out these great articles on Performancing.com which provide you the information and tactics you need to juice your RSS.
What Makes You Want To Subscribe
Feed Placement and Design Tips
How NOT to Sell RSS
RSS & CB Radio
If RSS Subscriptions Are Gold, Why Treat Them Like Dirt?
Do you have a tip or suggestion on how to organically increase RSS subscribers? If so, let us know in the comments. Lets talk about it and share some tactics.
6 thoughts on “How To Inflate Your FeedBurner Subscription Numbers”
“why bother tracking statistics for your blog or a website as every single analytics package has different numbers. Thereby making all of them false.”
Jeff – the widget is displayed. It’s not for the blog owner, it’s for the blog readers or possibly advertisers. I track my analytics for myself and only share them as needed with advertisers (with caveats). I don’t think my readers have any clue if my blog is popular or not. And I don’t care if the blogs I read are popular or not. Good content is good content.
Really, why hack the existing widget if you’re a person who wants to look important or popular. Why not just create some sort of original code that displays some sort of impressive and false statistics?
I don’t get bloggers sometimes.
Because it’s the only widget that provides this sort of information.
Because it gives them a glimpse as to how popular someone is. I guess it is a psychological thing. If people see other people already in the mix, subscribed to the content, then people won’t be afraid to jump in alone.
If that is your line of thought than why bother tracking statistics for your blog or a website as every single analytics package has different numbers. Thereby making all of them false.
Why would you post a widget that you know isn’t giving real info?
Why would a reader care how many subscribers you have.
The only people I would think who care are advertisers, and giving advertisers false information about readership, as far as I’m concerned, is fraud.
@Leland Exactly. If anything, this shows how much salt you need to take when looking at someones RSS numbers as presented by FeedBurner.
@UltimateBloggingExperiment That is good sound advice which is why I presented 5 articles from the Performancing archive to aid in growing RSS numbers organically.
I would recommend that no one tries this. They are going to fix it within a day or so anyway so it probably won’t be worth it. You won’t want to have your account suspended if they are able to track the people that are doing this. Just a thought.
Just shows how FeedBurner counts aren’t an accurate way of gauging a blog’s popularity. I wouldn’t be surprised if Netvibes “subscribers” didn’t count towards your FeedBurner number very soon. I wonder how many blog’s FeedBurner counts will plummet if/when this happens.
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