It seems like that for an eternity Feedburner stat counters have adorned blogs far and wide. Many bloggers have blogged about their Feedburner RSS Reader stats, increasing their RSS Reader stats and the value of Feedburner stats. A common philisophy evolved that the higher the number of RSS readers a blog has, the more worthy it is of advertising dollars. I believe this philosophy is archaic and any advertiser who is seeking an indicator of a blog’s strength for advertising purposes should never equate Feedburner RSS reader stats, which are easily gamed, with true “eyes on” traffic. Here’s why I believe this…
Holding Contests to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats
Countless bloggers have used contests to inflate their RSS reader stats. In the end they are only getting “ghost readers”, not real readers. Maybe you or I would never do it but wherever there is a contest on the internet that requires somebody to do something, there are cheaters trying to manipulate the system. For example : SockPuppet Blog is holding a contest. They are giving a Flip Mino to one lucky winner. All you have to do is subscribe to SockPuppet RSS feed by email. Great… So 15yo Wing Chen, who thinks he’s a genius hacker, uses 100 @mailinator.com disposable email addresses to subscribe to SockPuppet’s feed 100 times. Of course SockPuppet sees Wing Chen is cheating and disqualifies him from the contest but SockPuppet still has 100 new RSS feed readers. Rinse and repeat the contest ad nauseum to end up with thousands of “ghost readers”.
Using Bloglines to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats
Nothing can inflate Feedburner RSS reader stats faster and wider than being listed in “most popular subscriptions according to Bloglines members” (ask Michael Arrington). Of course, the most popular subscriptions never changes because 9 out of 10 new Bloglines users will choose to auto-subscribe to those featured blogs. Oops, I forgot to mention that Feedburner pulls subscriber count data from Bloglines on a daily basis… As with many online services, Bloglines probably has 10% active users at best, the rest are abandoned accounts or ghost accounts created by people who sign up hundreds of Bloglines accounts so they can sell “100 RSS Subscriber” packs on black hat webmaster forums. An industrious gamer could feasably create 20-30 Bloglines accounts every day using a different proxy and add desired feeds.
Using Feedblitz to Blitzkrieg Feedburner RSS Reader Stats
Feedblitz is a third party service used by Feedburner to agregate RSS reader data. Feedblitz allows readers to subscribe to an RSS feed via email. It’s a very popular service, especially with people who long ago learned to game this system simply by using a “catch all” email address on a domain they own to subscribe hundreds, if not thousands of times with email addresses @ their domain. As soon the subscribers are activated, use a qmail filter to pipe all the Feedblitz emails into /dev/null to make it look like the emails are being read and not bounced. And you were wondering how some of those awful blogs have 600+ RSS subscribers while you only have 16 ?
Should I Game my Feedburner RSS Reader Stats?
No offense to Feedburner, Feedblitz and Bloglines. They are all great services that I use daily and highly recommend to every blogger. They have to leave their systems relatively open for sincere users and the tactics used by people trying to game the system are not harmful to the rest of the users, so it’s a non-issue. At best, gaming Feedburner RSS Reader Stats is a personal, ethical issue that one must deal with for oneself. Which is why I believe that using the number of RSS readers a blog has to gauge it’s effectiveness from an advertising standpoint is ludicrous.
The funniest attempts to game Feedburner stats I’ve ever seen involve bloggers who either replace their Feedburner image with somebody elses or create a fake image that show off their desired count. One blogger even got called out for faking his feedburner image which was quite embarassing and led to the eventual demise of his “super affiliate” blog.
My opinion on gaming stats is “why bother” because in the advertising business, long term relationships are far more important than suckering people into believing you’re something that you’re not. I would rather have happy long term advertisers than an advertiser who feels cheated after the first contract expires and never advertises again.
I have a question about this, what is feedburner all about ?
I can see it on many blogs, but dont know about it..
Do there are any earning oppurtunity with feedburner
I don’t know how but suddenly one day Feedblitz added a whole bunch of new subscribers to both my blogs. I laughed about it and thought I’d share this with you. You might want to check your stats and see if any numbers have strangely jumped up.
Funniest part is I don’t even have a link to Feedblitz on found anywhere on my blogs.
Well.. in simple words, FeedBurner isn’t a money making machine for you. It’s mainly a RSS feed tool (a website promotion machine). You can use your own ideas and FeedBurner’s services and tools to make money. If you don’t know about RSS, Google is full of nice articles about RSS.
Now, if you need full definition of FeedBurner, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner
Yea its similar to google reader I suppose, just been around a lot longer.
I don’t pay much attention to how many RSS readers a blog has. Back in the day my friend and I used to game toplists for our Tribes clan. Since then I don’t put much stock in any counter thing.
I wish I could figure out a way to get more legitimate readers. I don’t want to cheat the system but any help would be nice.
It’s amazing how many people do take notice of this counter stats though, it builds reader trust most importantly whether they sign up to your RSS or not..
It is unfortunate that there are cheaters out there. I had no idea you could by feedburner stats. I do think that have over 100 readers and displaying it adds a certain amount of legitamacy to your blog. People are more inclined to subscribe if other are already doing it.
Well I really do not pay much attention to RSS and Blogs…I just can hope that i can count and a way to get more legitimate reader.
feed burner helps to generate traffic but there is no use unless you get some nice amount of subscribers.
I think RSS stats are so easily manipulated. I saw some guy from India on DigitalPoint forum selling a service to give the buyer 10 new RSS subscribers per day for one year. Count 3650 fake subscribers over a year and it looks slow grown. I guess what he was doing was signing up 10 new Gmail accts per day and subscribing with Feedblitz for all his clients. I’m sure he had some kind of automated script because when I PM’ed him he said he already had over 300 clients!!
Andrew has right! I saw the same things!
Me too! I would rather them to have a better experience through my blog than using unorthodox method to lure them here.
You can totally game the Feedburner stats. I thought this was relatively common knowledge. I have a friend who inflates all of his subscription stats and posts the stupid icon on his blog showing X,XXX subscribers when in reality he has only 10% of whatever number is displayed.
I, for one, have no reason to game Feedburner stats. My subscribers are interested in breastfeeding information and that’s what I deliver. No contests for feed subscribers, etc. For me, doing that would be unethical. However, it was interesting to learn how the system is gamed. Thanks for the information, Dave!
That was very interesting, now I’m wondering about the numbers of same MMO blogs that I visit. I already knew about the contests, but they could be using the other methods as well.