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How to fake Feedburner RSS subscriber count
October 12th, 2008I was wondering if it was a good idea to publish that one and finally came to the conclusion that I had to share this so everyone can understand how easy it is to fake the feedburner subscriber’s count and win any subscriber contest, anytime…It’s ridiculous. I’m posting this more so that everyone realize that it’s important to trust the person you are competing against or you could end up losing for stupid reasons.
I’m not posting this for people to do it, go out there and win contests or whatever: It’s not worth it because it is a FAKE subscriber count and won’t give you more readers, so don’t think about more traffic. I’m posting this because I’m sure you’ve asked yourself in the past: how the hell can that website have 100, 200 or 500 subscribers? How the hell did that website beat me in that contest? How the hell did that website increased its subscriber count by 100 overnight? Well folks, it’s easy as hell and that’s why the RSS subscribers count can really be BS.
You will also find some packages on DigitalPoint like “500 subscribers for 50$”. You can do shit alone, no need to pay. In fact, you don’t even want to do it alone because there really are NO ADVANTAGES and here’s why.
The Dumb Way
This is the easiest way to fake your RSS subscriber count and it is really dumb, but it works. The trick is to replace your feedburner chicklet with the one of a bigger website. For example, here’s the code I would have to put for frogstr.com:
<p><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/frogstr”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/frogstr?bg=99CCFF&fg=444444&anim=0″ height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0″ alt=”" /></a></p>
Now, what if I change http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/frogstr for http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TechCrunch ?
Oh look, I now have 967K readers! See how easy it is to trick it this way? Of course it would be really, really dumb to put the TechCrunch feed chicklet as people wouldn’t really believe you have 967K readers, but you could easily put the chicklet of a less popular blog with 200 subscribers when you really just have 10 readers. The downside is that you always have to use that chicklet and you don’t have much control over it.
The smart way
Here’s the smart way: how I would do it if I “had” to. This is a little more work, but you have a huge control over the amount of subscribers. That method is called email subscribers. I’m sure you all thought about this one once in your blogger’s life, subscribing fake readers with fake emails, but you thought is was too much work to create a hundred Gmail accounts, then logging into these 100 email accounts one by one to confirm your subscription. No, no, no…It’s way easier than that!
Most of you running a blog and paying for your hosting have access to a little web app called CPanel to control the settings of your web server. Through that CPanel, you can create email accounts fairly easily, but then again, are you going to create a hundred different email accounts and face the same problem? No you’re not. Why? Because you’re smarter than that!
On most hosts, you will have in the “Mail” section of your CPanel an icon called “Default Address”:
What’s the default address? By setting a default address, you can tell your host to forward EVERY invalid email @yourdomain.com to a valid email address of your choice. For instance, I could decide that every invalid email be forwarded to feedburnerhack@frogstr.com. This way, I can subscribe with feedburner with emails such as: fake001@frogstr.com, fake002@frogstr.com, fake003@frogstr.com, etc. and all confirmation emails will be sent to feedburnerhack@frogstr.com! Of course, feedburnerhack@frogstr.com has to be a valid email address, but you only have to create one email address instead of 500.
Now, some hosts have disabled the feature and you could see that message:
You can always enable the feature by contacting your host, you just have to find a decent reason. Otherwise, here’s what you would get:
Final step is just to login to your account feedhack@yourdomain.com and confirm every single subscription. It’s much easier and a lot quicker than having to log in into every single email account to confirm the subscriptions.
Of course doing a hundred subscriptions per days can be quite boring, but 5 daily isn’t too much of a pain and you end up with 35 more subscribers at the end of the week.
DON’T DO IT
Aright, now don’t do it. Why? It’s frickin’ not worth it. I mean OK you’ll win every contest out there, you’ll have 1000 subscribers but NO TRAFFIC. OK, you’ll be able to sell your ad spots a lot more, but don’t think the advertisers are dumb, they’ll notice that you’re NOT SENDING ANY TRAFFIC! OK, you’ll have 1000 subscribers, but no one commenting on your blog which is a little weird usually with 1000 subscribers.
There are really no advantages of doing it and I strongly discourage the practice. I just want every single one of you to think about it the next time you get into a subscriber contest. You better really trust the person you are competing against or you could end up being ****ed.
Some persons on Digital Point are selling packages like 100, 200 or 500 usbscribers for like 50$. Don’t buy that, you can do that shit alone. No need to pay 50$ for that crap. You don’t want to pay for it and you don’t want to do it anyway.
69 Responses to “How to fake Feedburner RSS subscriber count”
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This post was truely useful, thanks!
Great post….. I love the disclaimer… just common sense. Do not do it. Its always good to know what is out there and how people can manipulate the FeedCount but not worth it all to do it. Not if you are a serious blogger.
-Laura
Whateverebays last blog post..Welcome to FeedBurner
[...] But there are a few smart souls who know how to fake their feedburner subscriber count. [...]
An eye opener for all of us. Well, if you do this one, you are entitled to be called a "scammer".
Wow!Thanks for exposing it here!I shall not believe in such counter anymore.
LOL! I like the first STUPID METHOD! LOL….Just change the image and WOW! lol. hahaha…
Thanks for the laugh! HAhaa…
The second one I have already know it
Hmmm. Nice trick this can be good for all sorts of social experiments. Most of like the monkey see monkey do effect. Like fake new blogs feed burner account so that more people subscribe or something. Things like subscriber counts tend to get peoples attention you know. Perhaps I will pull one of these experiments someday but if I do I will warn my current readers in a post so that they do not feel tricked.
—-Archie (Luis)
Some blogs parse their subscriber counts out of the chicklet, and display them as text (with their own style). So why not just display an arbitrary large number, in text, and bypass the chicklet completely?
I think that if the post quality and readers (and thus comments, backlinks, etc) are not actually there, then a (faked) large number of subscribers certainly wouldn’t help with retaining any real readers.
Very interesting posts and well written. Thx for sharing it, keep up the good work..
Hey Ben,
Yup, It's working. It seems pretty cool. Till now i had a doubt about few blogs that how these guys are getting these many readers in such a short time. It seems all those are using this simple trick to show that they have good number of readers. Thanks for letting know about this.
Thanks
Sankar
great post, I agree!
But I still think feedburner is important to my site, because it gives a means for my readers to subscribe in the first place!
[...] Technorati or your neighbour, and they’ll all come up with a different story (most of it is fake, [...]
Hey great post. Thanks for this useful tips. Will surely try it soon
Oh, Thanks for the article. I was actually looking to get fake subscribers for mt client. Now I decided not to go with it.
Thanks again
Thanks for sharing this information Ben. It has been my frustration, why even on my hardwork on creating traffics there are still few followers. Now I know. Thanks a lot. I will be working much harder now.
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
It still draws visitor subscriptions