

Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) - joop
http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/04/feedburner-hack-how-to-get-2500-subscribers-overnight-video/
I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!
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rdj
Not quite. It's just a broken tracking system. I guess you could do this trick
to make some poor blogger think he just got 723459288 new subscribers
overnight, but you can't actually cause him to have that many.

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joop
Exactly, and that's why they have to fix it. We talk about numbers here, which
is a key indicator for many to see how popular a website is; We brought this
to light so Google/Feedburner will finally address it

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johns
And what, exactly, do you want FeedBurner to do? They're just using the number
NetVibes gives them and I doubt NetVibes is going to give them the ability to
inspect user accounts to check for dupe subscriptions. So unless your solution
for FeedBurner is "don't count NetVibes (or other aggregators that report
inaccurately)", there's nothing for them to do.

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shard
Oh, be creative. Just off the top of my head: Feedburner could separate out
aggregator reported counts, or show two numbers, one with aggregators and one
without.

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mattmaroon
I'm curious if inflating your RSS subscriber number gains you any significant
amount of extra subscribers. My guess is no.

Might help when selling RSS ads I guess.

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jraines
Actually, according to Aweber, it does (at least for email subscriptions,
displaying a chiclet with subscriber numbers increases opt-in).

It's a form of social proof.

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mattmaroon
Is there some sort of evidence of that? I guessed no because I assumed most
people don't even see it, but maybe people on the fence about subscribing do.

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shard
There's plenty of evidence that social proof works, it's just a questions of
whether there's something special about FeedBurner that would invalidate
social proof mechanics.

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johns
I don't think FeedBurner can fix this, short of not counting aggregators that
incorrectly report subscriber numbers (like NetVibes is doing in this case).

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thenextweb
As you can see in the video they add 1000 times the same feedurl. there is no
reason to allow this so it would be extremely easy to fix for Netvibes.

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johns
Exactly, the onus is on Netvibes, not FeedBurner.

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vaksel
why should Net Vibes fix this? It doesn't affect their user experience one
bit, why should they waste programmer hours fixing someone else's problem? For
them its better to leave this thing open since it means more free exposure.

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johns
Because they're the ones that have the ability to fix it. FeedBurner can't
determine the real subscriber number from the one NetVibes gives them, so it's
up to NetVibes to report an accurate number.

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shard
Relying on a third party to "do the right thing" is a dangerous path to take.
It's like putting up a robots.txt and saying it's up to the crawler
programmers/users to respect the rules.

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thenextweb
Incredible! Wonder how long it will take before feedburner fixes this...

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thenextweb
On Techcrunch too: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/all-it-takes-to-
inflate...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/all-it-takes-to-inflate-your-
feedburner-numbers-is-a-netvibes-account/)

