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Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video)

joop Written on 4th August 2008                                                                                                              95 COMMENTS some text
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

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


Feedburner hacked! on Vimeo.

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…

About the author: Joop Dorresteijn Joop is writing to us from Seoul, South-Korea. Besides sniffing around for the latest LG and Samsung innovations, he reports from the emerging start ups from this country. He also works with new media for ING Life, the multinational insurance firm from the Netherlands. Want to see more? See his HDR pictures and blog from Korea and subscribe to his Twitter account here.

95 comments/trackbacks to “Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video)”

  1. Aug 4, 2008: Anonymous

    [...] [via] [...]

  2. Aug 4, 2008: All It Takes To Inflate Your FeedBurner Numbers Is a Netvibes Account

    [...] 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 [...]

  3. Aug 4, 2008: Unfortune

    [...] 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 [...]

  4. Aug 5, 2008: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Netvibesを使ってFeedBurnerの購読者数をごまかすハウツー動画

    [...] 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。 [...]

  5. Aug 5, 2008: Our Techno Lyrics » Blog Archive » All It Takes To Inflate Your FeedBurner Numbers Is a Netvibes Account

    [...] 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 [...]

  6. Aug 5, 2008: Revenue Robot | Hack Feedburner - Increase RSS Subscribers

    [...] 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 [...]

  7. Aug 5, 2008: The Easy Way to Build Your Blog Readership « Billy Chia

    [...] 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 [...]

  8. Aug 5, 2008: Ajax Girl » Blog Archive » All It Takes To Inflate Your FeedBurner Numbers Is a Netvibes Account

    [...] 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 [...]

  9. Aug 5, 2008: TechCrunch en français » [fr] Maudit Feedburner

    [...] 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 [...]

  10. Aug 5, 2008: My friends and my community will not be ranked ! « Stetoscope

    [...] community will not be ranked ! Jump to Comments Have you seen the feedburn hack the guys of the next web had [...]

  11. Aug 5, 2008: How to Get 2500 New ‘Subscribers’ to Your Blog Overnight (and Why I Don’t Really Care)

    [...] 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 [...]

  12. Aug 5, 2008: Flavien Ganter » Comment augmenter significativement le nombre de lecteurs sur votre compteur FeedBurner ?

    [...] 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 [...]

  13. Aug 5, 2008: Verím len tým RSS štatistikám, ktoré Feedburner umožní sfalšovať : M+M+M+M (4M)

    [...] ukázalo veľmi pôvabne a vtipne urobené video na thenextweb.org, štatistiky služby Feedburner sa dajú sfalšovať elegantným a jednoduchým [...]

  14. Aug 5, 2008: links for 2008-08-05 [delicious.com] « Brent Sordyl’s Blog

    [...] 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 [...]

  15. Aug 5, 2008: links for 2008-08-05 [delicious.com] « PinoyBlurker @ PinoyBlogoSphere.com

    [...] Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) Published in: [...]

  16. Aug 5, 2008: Home Biss

    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…

  17. Aug 6, 2008: Feedburner Counts Can Be Faked | Blogging & Writing

    [...] 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 [...]

  18. Aug 6, 2008: 禾草唐楷 Chinese Blogger » 博客文章 » 刷FeedBruner 作弊新招曝光

    [...] 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~~~ [...]

  19. Aug 12, 2008: Twitter: Invented in 1935

    [...] 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! [...]

  20. Aug 13, 2008: Google shutters Feedburner Ad Network in favor of AdSense

    [...] 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 [...]

  21. Aug 15, 2008: How To Get Thousands of FeedBurner “Subscribers” Overnight | AdResidual

    [...] 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 [...]

  22. Sep 6, 2008: Como Aumentar el numero de Lectores de Feedburner « Toolsblogs’s Weblog

    [...] miles de años por la red, qué jodios!!… (las trampillas tarde o temprano se averiguan). Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on [...]

  23. Dec 8, 2008: HowIT.Co.CC Blog » Blog Archive » massive feed count on feedburner, cheat

    [...] shown in this video I viewed, Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) it is clear that most of the feed count chicklet like this: (taken from the same website of that [...]

  24. Dec 31, 2008: It is really possible to increase your feedburner subscriber count | TechLemon.com

    [...] You can read and view the online video here. It is clearly demonstrated how the subscriber count is increased from 40 to 2500. [...]

  25. Feb 7, 2009: Shuheb (Shuheb)

    2500+ Feedburner Count Overnight – http://tinyurl.com/b27hql

    Reply

  26. Feb 8, 2009: TheNextWeb - Reporting On The Latest Web News | Jowki

    [...] TheNextWeb is ran by a ‘bunch’ of journalists reporting daily on news updates affecting the world wide web. Recently I read a very interesting post on their blog which shows us; the people ‘how to maniuplate RSS Feedburner count’. Personally I though this was a very sneaky but interesting find – Click Here. [...]

  27. Feb 18, 2009: jordi_ruizr (jordi_ruizr)

    muy divertido el hack de feedburner http://tinyurl.com/b27hql la precisión al poder !!!! :) ja ja ja ja todo es humo

    Reply

  28. Feb 18, 2009: felices (felices)

    RT muy divertido el hack de feedburner http://tinyurl.com/b27hql la precisión al poder !!!! :) ja ja ja ja tod.. http://tinyurl.com/aefs45

    Reply

  29. Feb 18, 2009: felices (felices)

    RT RT muy divertido el hack de feedburner http://tinyurl.com/b27hql la precisión al poder !!!! :) ja ja ja ja .. http://tinyurl.com/da9ajf

    Reply

  30. Feb 18, 2009: felices (felices)

    RT RT RT muy divertido el hack de feedburner http://tinyurl.com/b27hql la precisión al poder !!!! :) ja ja ja .. http://tinyurl.com/cq9rld

    Reply

  1. By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Aug 4, 2008

    Extremely cool! Congratulations on this awesome hack. Now tell us; did you use this on thenextweb.org too???

    Reply

  2. By Chantal Coolsma on Aug 4, 2008

    ROTFLOL! Great! :-)

    Reply

  3. By Polle de Maagt on Aug 4, 2008

    LOL … great, guys!

    Reply

  4. By David Petherick on Aug 4, 2008

    Pure evil genius! Is there a hack for twittercounter.com yet?

    Reply

  5. By Robert S. on Aug 4, 2008

    Joop – great post and find! I have come across several blogs with 2000+ subscribers and the content was just abhorrent.

    Reply

  6. By Rafael on Aug 4, 2008

    So, what happens when you get slapped?

    Reply

  7. By Mich D aka @MichDdot on Aug 4, 2008

    I cant believe you brought them out like that :) Way cool.

    Peace
    Mich D

    Reply

  8. By Sjors on Aug 4, 2008

    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?

    Reply

  9. By Eden on Aug 4, 2008

    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.

    Reply

  10. By PChere on Aug 4, 2008

    Its really generous of you to share this secret with all bloggers. Now we know why those counts shoot in RSS competitions overnight.

    Reply

  11. By Hem on Aug 4, 2008

    Today i have 129 subscribers at http://hem.com.np lets see tomorrow… The results

    Reply

  12. By Jules on Aug 4, 2008

    Darn! You found out. Now I’m going to cancel my 1200 thenexweb.org rss subscriptions ;-)

    Reply

    By Boris on August 4th, 2008:

    No problem! I was just ADDING 1200 thenexweb.org rss subscriptions so that should even out just fine! ;-)

    Reply

  13. By David Bradley on Aug 4, 2008

    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

    Reply

    By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 4th, 2008:

    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…

    Reply

    By David Bradley on August 4th, 2008:

    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.

    Reply

  14. By androo on Aug 4, 2008

    a brilliant hack…!

    Reply

  15. By Nick Gonzalez on Aug 4, 2008

    Great post. I believe pageflakes had the same issue.

    Reply

  16. By DLWarner on Aug 5, 2008

    Haha, nice one…no more trusting them stats counters eh :P

    Reply

  17. By Glenn on Aug 5, 2008

    Its a nice post.. just blog it too, check my pingback.. thanks :)

    Reply

  18. By Pratyush on Aug 5, 2008

    Awesome Joop. Loved the trick. I hope it will be fixed soon. Just out of curiosity, is TheNextWeb faking it too :P ??

    Reply

  19. By Krishna on Aug 5, 2008

    It’s Cool, Keep up the Good Job.

    Reply

  20. By Syl20 on Aug 5, 2008

    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).

    Reply

  21. By Steven Carroll on Aug 5, 2008

    Top POST/hack. This one is going viral….

    Reply

  22. By Anthony Kuntz on Aug 5, 2008

    It is not a Feedburner hack, but a Netvibes hack, because this is Netvibes who provides the number of subscribers in the HTTP logs…

    Reply

  23. By Arun on Aug 5, 2008

    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

    Reply

  24. By Hack_Is_Fixed on Aug 5, 2008

    The hack seems to have been FIXED:

    http://www.megaleecher.net/Fee.....riber_Hack

    Thanks

    Reply

    By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 5th, 2008:

    No it isn’t. Or at least that article you mention doesn’t deliver any proof that it is…

    Reply

    By Hack_Is_Fixed on August 5th, 2008:

    you can check the above mentioned test site at : http://www.joopdorresteijn.com/ the subscriber count is 23 !!!

    Reply

    By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 6th, 2008:

    It is 3737 right now…

    Reply

  25. By Navin Poeran on Aug 5, 2008

    I tested it yesterday, but today i’m still not seeing any increase… maybe they fixed it.

    Reply

    By Joop Dorresteijn on August 5th, 2008:

    Your netvibes universe must be public

    Reply

    By Navin Poeran on August 5th, 2008:

    how do i undo that?

    Reply

    By Navin on August 6th, 2008:

    Hey man, just checked it again, its working, w00t

    Reply

  26. By James on Aug 5, 2008

    I have tried it, and It didn’t work.. It is probably fixed

    Reply

  27. By IhateDesign on Aug 5, 2008

    pure evil, jaja!

    Reply

  28. By 禾草唐楷 on Aug 5, 2008

    Today 177 tomorrow=??? I try to do that,about +500,I’ll wait it~~~

    Reply

  29. By Germz on Aug 5, 2008

    They fixed the loophole.

    Reply

  30. By alexf2000 on Aug 6, 2008

    It is interesting if that was a problem specifically with netvibes or with any other aggregator as well?

    Reply

  31. By El on Aug 6, 2008

    Yep I found out that my feed is not increasing, i guess they have already fix it :P

    Reply

    By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 6th, 2008:

    Not fixed yet. Joopdorresteijn.com now has a feedburner count of 3737: http://joopdorresteijn.com/

    Reply

  32. By 禾草唐楷 on Aug 6, 2008

    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~~~~

    Reply

  33. By JSAHW on Aug 6, 2008

    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

    Reply

  34. By Rock! on Aug 6, 2008

    After applying this experiment how publisher get back to their real subscriber number? And please let us know if it is fixed or not.

    Reply

  35. By Joop Dorresteijn on Aug 6, 2008

    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

    Reply

  36. By Paman Gober on Aug 7, 2008

    Nice trick, i think i will apply to my blog too… :D

    Reply

  37. By social network on Aug 9, 2008

    what about other social networks ?

    Reply

  38. By ғαқε_ρяïи¢ε on Aug 11, 2008

    cool

    Reply

  39. By moserw on Aug 12, 2008

    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…

    Reply

  40. By ali on Aug 17, 2008

    Where can i get an OPML file?

    Reply

  41. By Eric on Aug 20, 2008

    Wow, Its amazing something so simple can be done to mess with the numbers

    Reply

  42. By ғαқε_ρяïи¢ε on Sep 9, 2008

    What is the opml file ?
    where to create it ?
    thanks :-)

    Reply

  43. By googleholic on Sep 14, 2008

    nice trick……

    Reply

  44. By Jacob on Nov 16, 2008

    OPML generator http://feed2opml.com

    Reply

  45. By BurnFeedr on Dec 9, 2008

    Here’s a tool that works for this trick:

    http://www.feedboostr.com

    Reply

  46. By prasaja on Dec 13, 2008

    yummmmmmmyyyyy. great tutorial…

    http://ronajingga.com

    Reply

  47. By Casimir on Jan 15, 2009

    Excellent Blog, bravos.

    Reply

  48. By Casimir on Jan 15, 2009

    Excellent travaille, bonne continuations

    Reply

  49. By Coolbuster on Feb 4, 2009

    This is one of the best post I have read. About the hack oh well, its the bloggers conscience that will hunt him…

    Reply

  50. By InternetBusinessPlan on Feb 25, 2009

    Great idea. Will try this tactic soon…
    looking forward to more ideas

    Reply

  51. By Joel on Feb 28, 2009

    Hi guys Good post! im gonna check if it still workin’

    Reply

  52. By M Rahman on Mar 26, 2009

    Seems like a good thing for those who want to inflate their figures. I have myself never bothered about such things. I am happy with my feeds actual figure

    Reply

  53. By agitsan on May 5, 2009

    its not function again to day, so stop using its

    Reply

  54. By bio necklace sales on Jun 22, 2009

    how about google sandbox??
    is this save ???

    Reply

  55. By Greg on Jul 1, 2009

    The whole idea of hacking the count is somewhat of a worthless technique. From what I have read this does not play a significant role in increasing real subscribers. To do that, you only need to provide good content, and make sure that it is published on a consistent basis. In my own experience, once every 4 or 5 days seems to be best.

    Regardless, Google (feedburner) has taken measures against this hack, and it does not work any longer.

    Still, interesting post and great video to demonstrate it.

    Reply

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