Cheated By A Fake Feedcount? Here’s How To Find Out!
Posted by: Manish in Blogging Tips & Advices, General, tags: Fake FeedCount, Feed Analysis 1.1, Top Blogging Mistakes
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I was surfing through net last night and found out something really interesting. I stumbled upon this blog which had 1000+ RSS readers! Hmm…Had the contents been rich, I would have believed, but hey, how could I believe that with such poor designing and such useless contents and crappy videos! I immediately tracked its Alexa ranking and further saw no traffic at all! No way could this guy have gotten 1000+ readers! I immediately started digging into it and to my surprise, I found out that that blogger was using someone else’s feedcount stats! I then started wondering…why would he do that?
I started digging further into this matter (In fact, I thought this would be really interesting to my readers as well and hence a good blog topic for me as well :D).
If you think that the RSS feed subscriber count couldn’t possibly be faked, think again!
First of all, I would like to ask you a simple question.
Would you be more interested to subscribe to this blog if it had this “1616 readers” feed count chicklet (which makes it appear that 1616 readers are reading this blog) rather than the actual “11 readers” chicklet that you can see in the right sidebar?
Exactly! That’s the main concept. The concept here is that people are like sheep; they go where all the rest goes, and if it appears that a large number of people are reading a blog, then this “why not me too” syndrome starts kicking off and people tend to subscribe! Many people prefer to subscribe to a blog only after they find that it is being read by many people.
However, faking feedcount is really easy. I generated the above image just within 2 minutes with Photoshop and linked it to my feed. So I guess we can instantly make a 12 subscriber blog to 1616 subscribers 
(Phew, I didn’t know getting readers were that easy…LOL)
However, people may have a doubt on that ’static’ RSS feedcount as it never changes. A smarter faking idea thus would be to edit the code of feedcount and use other popular blog’s feedcount stats.
This is the Feedburner code:
<a href=http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDNAME>
<img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/FEEDYOUWANTTOBE?
bg=99CCFF&fg=444444&anim=0&label=listeners”height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0″ alt=”" /></a>
To use other’s feedcounts in a blog, one would simply need to replace the “FEEDYOUWANTTOBE” with that blog’s feed address. It’s so simple and that feedcount will be dynamic, corresponding to that other blog’s feedcount. But is it ethical?
Definitely Not! Faking your feedcount may help to increase the RSS readers, but I really don’t think this is a healthy way to attract readers. This is the path of dishonesty, a shameless blog promotion where you cheat your readers, in which you can easily lose credibility, and if your readers find out that you’re using a fake feedcount, you’ll just look like a fool, and once you lose this credibility, in no way will you be able to regain it! And the worst part, what if someone exposes you 
So my suggestion is, if you are really that embarrassed by your reader count, simply don’t display it than faking it!
I then further started surfing through Google to find if any site offers feedcount check, that can shows whether a site’s RSS feedcount is fake or not, and after an hour of search and going from links to links, hey I finally found out one!
So are you interested to know if someone’s RSS feedcount is real or fake? Do you want to check whether you are subscribing with a blog that did not trick you with a fake feedcount?
The answer is BlogPerfume’s Feed Analysis 1.1. Feed Analysis 1.1 is very easy, free tool that can help you to analyze yours or anyone else’s FeedBurner RSS Feed. So now you can easily check out whether the blogs that you have subscribed from are using real feedcount stats or not! At least with this free feed analysis tool, I think fake feedcounts will be greatly minimized and more blogs that use fake feedcounts will be exposed!
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Hey! Thanks to all the recent subscribers who subscribed to my blog. Now I’ve got 15 subscribers
What’s so wrong about using the fake feedcounts?
It is just about giving the readers a positve feeling about your website. If the contents are crap, then those who subscribed will simply unsubscribe…so what’s the big deal with faking the feedcounts? And those who find the articles interesting will subscribe irrespective of the faked feedcounts. Yes you are right that generally people tend to look for how many readers are reading before they subscribe, and we can use that as a plus point to gain more readers.
You’re talking as if those who fake feedcounts are a goddamn criminals
@Ted:
In my opinion, if we are to truly value and respect our readers, then this must never be done. That’s it! The End. Full Stop….
Wow! That is so crazy, I can’t believe someone would even think to do that. I mean it makes sense from a psychological standpoint, I know that when I stopped by zenhabits.net I saw his 50k subscribers and thought “wow I MUST subscribe” so if you are going to fake it I would go big. But businesswise it would inevitably lead to some sort of implosion. You just can’t be deceitful in business. The bigger you become, the uglier it will be when a little thing like this is exposed.
Hi Dr. Nicole, thanks for stopping by.
Yes, I agree with you that the bigger you become, the uglier it gets when things like this is exposed, which can really negatively impact upon the readers such that all the readers who’d subscribed won’t hesitate at all to unsubscribe, and hence those people will end up losing valuable readers.
Why take so much trouble to fake your feed count
while it can be checked with simple url string
check this out
“http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=”
put your feed name (or the one you want to check) and hit enter you will be greeted with the subscriber count hits of the day and reach of the day
if you want to check complete history of that feed then you can add “&dates=2008-05-01,2008-08-10″
as simple as that
[...] never miss any of my interesting articles. Thanks for visiting!Just a month after I wrote “Cheated By A Fake Feedcount? Here’s How To Find Out!” I’ve again come across a feedcount hack, and trust me, it’s the best feedcount [...]
CHEATER!!! BLASPHEMY!!!
You’ve just destroyed Feedburner’s little chicklet.. (I know your not the first one
)
What you’ve done CANNOT be reversed.
Enjoy the internet while it’s still around *Sniff*
LOL…
Interesting post, I was aware people did it but wasn’t sure what they did. Thanks.
Good one, I was plaining on bit now I won’t LOL