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.






Social media has become a rising phenomenon in Web2.0 with three main contenders fighting it out for control of an endless stream of internet users. MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter are all reaching for the brass ring but as each evolves around it’s users, a trend is emerging that has the lines between each drawn by generation rather than assimilation.




