Feedburner Hack Boosts Subscribers
August 6th, 2008 by David Bradley >> 4 Comments
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.
"Deceived Wisdom: Why What You Thought Was Right Is Wrong" from David Bradley. Available now on 
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Rudy // Aug 7, 2008 at 12:03 am
I asked the question to some of the well known bloggers out there about RSS feed subscribers. They’re saying it helps their popularity. I sort of agree. But, as you say, if it’s being hacked and manipulated, it becomes a hogwash.
#1 goal is still content, me thinks.
Rudys last blog post..OC’s Public Transport: Not There Yet
David Bradley // Aug 7, 2008 at 7:35 am
To be honest, the only people to whom feedcount really counts are the bloggers themselves, with a large proportion of the readers of blogs (not about blogging or SEO matters), there is actually little awareness of any difference between a blog and a normal website and certainly no understanding of feeds and Feedburner. Ask a random sample of people you know beyond computing/blogging circles if they are aware of what to do with an RSS and they will undoubtedly be confused.
im?veis indaiatuba // Jun 3, 2009 at 2:29 pm
As i always say, never underestimate the power of rss! besides driving lots of traffic into your site it can also be a very usefull tools to pull articles from other sources… tks for the post! ps: the aumatic translation to portuguese doesn?t make any sense lol
David Bradley // Jun 3, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Thanks for dropping by and for your patience with the translation. I suspect there are too many technical terms making it impossible to get a clear translation, apologies for that.