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! (read more)
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.
So, what happens when you get slapped?
I cant believe you brought them out like that :) Way cool.
Peace
Mich D
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-feedburner-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
Its a nice post.. just blog it too, check my pingback.. thanks :)
Awesome Joop. Loved the trick. I hope it will be fixed soon. Just out of curiosity, is TheNextWeb faking it too :P ??
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…
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/Feedburner_Subscriber_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…
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!
Today 177 tomorrow=??? I try to do that,about +500,I’ll wait it~~~
They fixed the loophole.
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/
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~~~~
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…
Where can i get an OPML file?
Wow, Its amazing something so simple can be done to mess with the numbers
What is the opml file ?
where to create it ?
thanks :-)
nice trick……
OPML generator http://feed2opml.com
Here’s a tool that works for this trick:
http://www.feedboostr.com
yummmmmmmyyyyy. great tutorial…
http://ronajingga.com
Excellent Blog, bravos.
Excellent travaille, bonne continuations
This is one of the best post I have read. About the hack oh well, its the bloggers conscience that will hunt him…
Great idea. Will try this tactic soon…
looking forward to more ideas
Hi guys Good post! im gonna check if it still workin’
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
its not function again to day, so stop using its
how about google sandbox??
is this save ???
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.
Seems like a good thing for those who want to inflate their figures.
But i think the feeds which increase get lost automatically after 7-8 days..
what happened to hard work and providing good enough content to make people want to subscribe?? nice find though and thanks for sharing it with us all.
h ello all thhis is nice but what happens if google bans our site
wow…..