Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video)
Established blogs like ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch proudly show a Feedburner chicklet that displays the sites popularity. But beware – since people are more likely to subscribe to a site with a bigger amount of readers, some sites manipulate the counter.
Every once and a while co-editor Patrick and I stumble on a shady looking website with a ton of readers. That made us wonder whether Feedburner is hackable. I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!
We found an easy way to hack Feedburner (Not the obvious hack that simply steals a chicklet from a popular site). Looking at the subscriber count at some sites, we’re not the first ones who found out, but we are the first ones to write it down. All it takes is an OPML file, a Netvibes Universe, and a good night’s sleep.
EDIT: While the hack still works, I am happy to tell you that Google and Netvibes are working on a solution to the problem. Steve Olechowski, co-founder Feedburner mailed me and said: “These things happen occasionally and are usually fixed in a couple of days”, he added that the feedburner counts do not influence advertisement measurement. Franck Mahon from Netvibes said: “We are working on a fix to filter out in the reporting the duplicates while still allowing people to add several instances of the widget to their startpage.” When things get fixed, it would be interesting to see the differences on some sites.
How to manipulate your Feedburner subscribers in two minutes
Moral of the story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things up.
Once they do this, it will be very interesting to see which blogs suddenly lose a bunch of subscribers…
Joop is business development manager in Shanghai. He likes shine objects, Shabu shabu and firecrackers. Check out his personal blog, Follow Joop on Twitter
Extremely cool! Congratulations on this awesome hack. Now tell us; did you use this on thenextweb.org too???
ROTFLOL! Great! :-)
LOL … great, guys!
Pure evil genius! Is there a hack for twittercounter.com yet?
Joop – great post and find! I have come across several blogs with 2000+ subscribers and the content was just abhorrent.
[...] [via] [...]
[...] is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their [...]
So, what happens when you get slapped?
I cant believe you brought them out like that :) Way cool.
Peace
Mich D
[...] is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their [...]
There goes the value of my Feedreaders, if everyone can mass produce them, we will have hyperinflation on our back pretty soon. Nice trick though, I think I will sent out a bunch of emails tonight, than I can guarantee to double amount your amount of feed readers in a month for only 300 usd, anyone interested?
So, I assume we can run some scripts or searches of NetVibes and find pages with thousands of subscriptions to the same feed? I’ve never used NetVibes so maybe it doesn’t work that way, but I’m going to try to find out. Sadly, it won’t load right now as the TechCrunch report apparently killed it.
Its really generous of you to share this secret with all bloggers. Now we know why those counts shoot in RSS competitions overnight.
Today i have 129 subscribers at http://hem.com.np lets see tomorrow… The results
Darn! You found out. Now I’m going to cancel my 1200 thenexweb.org rss subscriptions ;-)
No problem! I was just ADDING 1200 thenexweb.org rss subscriptions so that should even out just fine! ;-)
I wouldn’t recommend trying this. Google is certainly aware of the issue and could come down very hard on sites that have obviously jumped to several thousand users from just a handful. That said my Feedburner count goes up and down so much because of reporting problems with the system, I’m not even sure how they’d be able to tell. I wrote about the Feedburner Myth a while back on Sciencetext – http://www.sciencetext.com/the.....-myth.html
Since this is an obvious bug in Netvibes & Feedburner I would guess that Google would simply fix the bug instead of punish those abusing it. But we will probably find out soon…
Perhaps…I still wouldn’t risk trying to exploit such a loophole unless my hat was very black…just in case, you never know what repercussions it might have on a site.
a brilliant hack…!
Great post. I believe pageflakes had the same issue.
Haha, nice one…no more trusting them stats counters eh :P
[...] FeedBurnerの購読者数をごまかすことができるということに驚く人はあまりいないだろう。しかし方法の簡単さについては驚きを感じるのではないだろうか。上に貼った動画にある通りNetvibesのアカウントを取得するだけで、購読数をごまかすことができる。アムステルダムのNext Webは、FeedBurnerの購読者数を43から一夜にして2500にしてしまった。方法は簡単で、同じフィードを2500回コピーしてOPMLファイルを作成し、それをNetvibesのページに貼り付けるだけだ。これにより誰も購読しているわけでないブログフィードが2500件でき、FeedBurnerはこれを2500の購読者数としてカウントする。 [...]
[...] is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their [...]
[...] is simple and amazing I came across a very interesting post over at: thenextweb.org. It talks about how you can hack Feedburner in 2 minutes (video below) and get a ridiculous amount [...]
[...] me to put up the very best content for you. I have a goal to reach 100 readers by December. Using joop’s hack I could have that number tomorrow, but it wouldn’t represent you, the real people who read [...]
Its a nice post.. just blog it too, check my pingback.. thanks :)
[...] is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their [...]
Awesome Joop. Loved the trick. I hope it will be fixed soon. Just out of curiosity, is TheNextWeb faking it too :P ??
[...] tous habitués aux aléas du service qui impacte le nombre d’abonnés ici et là. Mais les petits malins de Next Web on trouvé une manière de manipuler aisément votre compteur simplement en important un fichier OPML [...]
It’s Cool, Keep up the Good Job.
Hi,
In my point of view it’s more a netvibes problem than a feedburner one. Feedburner rely on the number of subscribers given by netvibes.
So the best is to wait for a fix from netvibes (hope it will come soon).
Top POST/hack. This one is going viral….
It is not a Feedburner hack, but a Netvibes hack, because this is Netvibes who provides the number of subscribers in the HTTP logs…
[...] community will not be ranked ! Jump to Comments Have you seen the feedburn hack the guys of the next web had [...]
This is an interesting hack who ever got hacked whether it is feedburner or netvibes, it is quite sure that some blogs are using this technique to show fake number of readers. If this issue gets tackled then lots of blogs are going to lose their readers. Lets see what happens.
http://www.simplewayoflife.net
The hack seems to have been FIXED:
http://www.megaleecher.net/Fee.....riber_Hack
Thanks
No it isn’t. Or at least that article you mention doesn’t deliver any proof that it is…
you can check the above mentioned test site at : http://www.joopdorresteijn.com/ the subscriber count is 23 !!!
It is 3737 right now…
[...] 2nd blog about blogging today seems to be writing about a video showing how to get 2500 subscribers overnight using a Netvibes accounts and an OPML file with thousands of copies of your own feed in [...]
[...] en quelque sorte le buzz du moment : NextWeb a réussi à hacké le compteur de FeedBurner en augmentant le nombre de lecteurs de 2 500 (bien [...]
[...] ukázalo veľmi pôvabne a vtipne urobené video na thenextweb.org, štatistiky služby Feedburner sa dajú sfalšovať elegantným a jednoduchým [...]
I tested it yesterday, but today i’m still not seeing any increase… maybe they fixed it.
Your netvibes universe must be public
how do i undo that?
Hey man, just checked it again, its working, w00t
I have tried it, and It didn’t work.. It is probably fixed
pure evil, jaja!
[...] Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight Moral of the story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things up. (tags: feedburner rss) Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Article 4 : The InternetFollow up on top social networks by engagementOnline communities and Social NetworkingRapleaf Research Into Social Networks Not Particularly Revealing [...]
[...] Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) Published in: [...]
Today 177 tomorrow=??? I try to do that,about +500,I’ll wait it~~~
They fixed the loophole.
How do bloggers and probloggers cheat on their feed counts?…
Bloggers and probloggers are fond of showing off their big fat feed counts on their blogs. They normally do that by placing cute little widgets provided by Feedburner, Feedblitz or many other feed syndication and subscription service providers. Many of…
It is interesting if that was a problem specifically with netvibes or with any other aggregator as well?
Yep I found out that my feed is not increasing, i guess they have already fix it :P
Not fixed yet. Joopdorresteijn.com now has a feedburner count of 3737: http://joopdorresteijn.com/
[...] by the years. There are plus ways to fake the Feedburner subscriber count. The video below from The Next Web shows a way to do that using [...]
tell you the truth,it really has been changed,+500 indeed,that’s funny and interesting,thanks for your video,The Next Web~~~lovly site~~~~
[...] TheNexWeb日前公开FeedBruner作弊的大招：how to get 2500 subscribers overnight ，如何让你的订阅数在一夜之间达到K级，这里说的可是作弊大招而绝不是那种偷偷链向别人图片的阴招。作者提供了详细的操作视频，方法其实非常简单，自己在编辑器中编辑一个标准的XML文件，代码中将自己Feed地址做多次复制，可以是几百，几千甚至是几万，然后访问著名的Netvibes，通过导入XML的方式迅速实现订阅量的快速增长。一分钟的操作，剩下的就是你睡一大觉，起来后会发现你的订阅数如你所愿般的达到了令人生畏的境界，从此你就成了月光和静蕾~~~ [...]
interesting…. has it been proven that the more readers that is seems like you have with feedburner the more likely a new viewer will subscribe?? just wondering
After applying this experiment how publisher get back to their real subscriber number? And please let us know if it is fixed or not.
I am happy to announce that Google and Netvibes are working on a solution together. Steve Olechowski, co-founder Feedburner mailed me and said: “These things happen occasionally and are usually fixed in a couple of days. We have a number of facilities in our system to quickly tune our algorithms to provide publishers with an understanding of their audience. It’s worth noting that we don’t use subscriber numbers for measurement with advertisers, we use a number of other measures we collect.”
Franck Mahon from Netvibes said “We are working on a fix to filter out in the reporting the duplicates while still allowing people to add several instances of the widget to their startpage.”
@Rock! If you want to disable your universe, just send an e-mail to the Netvibes support team on: http://tinyurl.com/nhblm
Nice trick, i think i will apply to my blog too… :D
what about other social networks ?
cool
Seems like a good thing for those who want to inflate their figures. I have myself never bothered about such things. Still Google might penalize some for showing inflated figures…
[...] Came here from StumbleUpOn? Want to know how to hack Feedburner and add thousands of RSS subscribers in one day? Or maybe you want to know where ctrl+alt+delete came from? I hope you like that post! [...]
[...] of RSS feed management, even if we showed how the numbers of subscribers they report can be easily manipulated. Good alternatives for monetizing RSS feeds include Yahoo, Pheedo and Text Link Ads. Feedster, on [...]
[...] below video was created by The Next Web and it shows a way to artificially boost your FeedBurner count by many thousands. All you need is a [...]