Feedburner Hack Boosts Subscribers

I bang on and on about the Feedburner myth on Sciencetext, about how users of the system should not set too much store by the figures they see on other people’s sites or on their own, come to that.

There are, you see, so many ways that the RSS subscriber numbers can rise and fall on a daily basis depending on the time of the week, the holiday seasons and outages on the systems like Google Reader (Google now owns Feedburner, by the way, and you can add the Sciencetext feed to Google right now).

But, without wishing to make any specific accusations, did you ever stop to wonder whether some of those so-called alpha bloggers actually have as many genuine readers as their Feedburner chicklets would suggest or are they artificially inflated by those sites being included in auto-feed packages and options in feed readers. Worse, could it be that some bloggers with enormous counts have actually figured out the Feedburner hack (from thenextweb.org) in this video? I really wouldn’t like to say and I certainly wouldn’t condone using such a hack. If you do, you’re really only lying to yourself as 99% of visitors to your site couldn’t care less what your subscriber count is, all they’re after is informative, entertaining and well written content. Think on.

The bottom line on this hack, which is all over the blogosphere at the moment, is why waste your time and effort manipulating a number about which most of your readers will not care less. Instead, you could have been researching and writing a great new blog post or some flagship content that would attract genuine readers to your site and perhaps even make them stay.