When browsing around the Internet and observing different niches such as travel and technology there is one element that is bothersome within supposedly popular blogs, and that is—The Google Feedburner Subscription Counter. If you are wondering why your Google Feedburner Subscription numbers are extremely low within your niche, while only a handful of people perceive to have thousands or tens of thousands of Feedburner Subscribers—well the “number expression” is one big falsification from the reality of active RSS readers. When doing research and identifying a few cheaters I cannot help from losing some respect for the blogger. Ironically, egocentric popularity and moneymaking obsession dominates the theme of the blogger. The dishonest liar harms the travel blogging community and the honest travel blogger who desires to make some extra money to supplement their travels.
Understanding the System of FeedBurner:
There are three statistics that Feedburner displays—Circulation, Hits, and Reach. The Circulation can be manipulated through four different technical sources which two are a hack. Hits are also deceiving, but by viewing the graph in relation to hits and subscribers will prove if someone is cheating the numbers. The Reach indicates the true numbers of people that are reading from the RSS reader or email.
A Clear Level of Manipulation
The Manipulation and Falsification of Feedburner Circulation Statistics:
The most important dynamic to understand is that the “subscribers of FriendFeed” are added to FeedBurners Circulation Statistics. Head on over to Google owned FriendFeed and search for the person that you suspect to be under the vail of delusion concerning their Feedburner chicklet posted on their homepage of their blog. If you are viewing subscribers statistics of 5000 but their FriendFeed account reflects 3000, you can chop off 3000 from the 5000. Read this from the Feedburner Blog.
A Massive Jump within a Few Days
The Above Graph and using the below url pulled up this <entry date=”2010-07-22″ circulation=”15622″ hits=”7550″ reach=”299″/>
Do you notice something a little off? The circulation projects almost 16,000 subscribers, but half hits, yet only 300 people read the post.
You can use the below URL to find out the Reach, just change the “ADD ID” to the Feedburner ID you want to look up. I experienced Firefox to pull up the statistics next to Chrome or Safari.
https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=ADD ID
The Awareness API is only available via HTTPS, on port 443 according to Google API Information.
The API will only show the stats if the users Feed count is active.
For a specific date you can try to add &dates=2010-05-01 after the ID.
After looking at these numbers compare the number of comments. Surly a 10,000 reader count should at least average 100 comments, and the RSS would Reach over 5000, but that is not the case with several different sites.
After viewing the Reach numbers of people that read from the feed you may be astonished to learn there is no comparison between the Reach and the Circulation numbers. The Reach number is what Feedburner should be displaying. To get a better idea of the Reach numbers investigate the site the day or after a new blog post.
An Honest Graph
The above chart is from Pearsonified the architect of the framework of Thesis. There are over 27,000 customers of Thesis and the subscription of feedburner for Pearsonified is under 9000. The highest amount of comments are over 300 with a Page Rank of 7 on Pearsonified. Chris Pearson does not have a FriendFeed Account.
So how can we find out who is outright cheating and lying to their readers and who is honest? Head over to Blog Perfume and checkout their Feed Analysis interface. Blog Perfume’s Feedburner Subscription Analysis interface can show the Circulation and Hits from the last 50 months. And the Views and Clicks from the last three months. The charts displayed are screenshots from Blog Perfume.
Important Note: Feedburner’s Hits are extremely exaggerated, you can learn how exaggerated through comparing your own feed hits with your tracking service. I suggest to use a tracking service other than Google Analytics to comprehend the correct page views.
Notice the Steady Level of Growth
How Do Bloggers Manipulate the FeedBurner Numbers?
- On the Analyze page of your Freedburner account click on “Configure Stats, and make sure “Item Click Links” is checked, this will send more numbers for the circulation numbers.
- Use FriendFeed, as mentioned above, the subscriptions numbers are added to the Subscriber Circulation numbers of Feedburner. Friendfeed is a lot like Twitter, and can be configured to automatically post from your Twitter account.
- Creating 10 or 20 new emails a day and subscribing to your own feed. 10 new emails alone with bring in 3650 in a year, but the account will never see a reach nor a hit count.
- Possibly use Feedblitz.
- Creating a OPML file with the correct code and uploading to Netvibes (view video below). With this process a person can increase their circulation numbers by thousands on one day. Supposedly, Feedburner and Netvibes are woking on a fix, formally people used Pageflakes to accomplish the delusion.
Video from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.
Using Feedblitz to Blitzkrieg Feedburner RSS Reader Stats:
Feedblitz is a third party service used by Feedburner to agregate RSS reader data. Feedblitz allows readers to subscribe to an RSS feed via email. It’s a very popular service, especially with people who long ago learned to game this system simply by using a “catch all” email address on a domain they own to subscribe hundreds, if not thousands of times with email addresses @ their domain. As soon the subscribers are activated, use a qmail filter to pipe all the Feedblitz emails into /dev/null to make it look like the emails are being read and not bounced. And you were wondering how some of those awful blogs have 600+ RSS subscribers while you only have 16?
Source of Feedblitz Manipulation
If you are an egocentric person who enjoys causing a delusion upon others that stems from a low self-esstem I recommend the above ideas.
Please Note: I use Feedblitz on one of my blogs that is not related to this travel blog. They offer decent service and the only alternative to using FeedBurner, however they charge for the email subscribers, but not the RSS.
The all new FeedBurner Subscription Icon. Just click and drag to your desktop, upload to your server and replace your delusional Subscriber Circulation Count.
What about the Numbers of Google Page Rank and Twitter?
Googles page rank can also be a delusion. There are many cases how a blogger will comment how they learned to change some code within their theme and their page rank increased over night from 3 to 5. My moderate travel blog carries a page rank of 4. Since I moved from Blogger to WordPress the page rank is not reflecting but should on the next Google Page Rank update, but really does it mean anything? Will it increase to 5 because I am using the framework of Thesis? Maiden Voyage is using the Thesis framework and reflects a page rank of 5 and her blog will be only one year old this August.
One example is Andy Hobo Traveler, his blog only has a page rank of 3, but has 55,000 pages index with Google and averages 7000 page views a day—Andy is in his 12th year of travel. One main reason for the low page rank, most likely, is the blogger.html format next the php WordPress format. Andy disabled his RSS feed prior, but now only uses the Atom feed and not Feedburner.
Now look at PlanetD, they have a page rank of 5 on their blog that is only a little over a year old. They commented prior that their page rank changed from legitimately changing some code (see below comment). They were told that their blog was being read as two separate websites and we needed to change our code so that Google would read it as one website. PlanetD numbers as follows, RSS close to 300, highest number of comments 62, Page Rank 5.
So if your thinking that high numbers correlate with each other, they don’t. Twitter is a fine example.
Manipulation of Twitter and the Delusion of Numbers:
Wow, that person has 150,000 followers but only half are following back, that person surly is popular. Think again, as a user Mass Follows people to get them to follow back, all that user needs to do is to quietly un-follow half, which most users will never even comprehend that the original user un-followed them.
Are these people following and unfollowing thousands of people manually? The answer is No. There are many scripts that user can use to mass follow people, but there is one site called (use at your own risk) “mass-follow.com”. Buy using Mass-Follow the user can add the daily limit within a half an hour. Then wait to see how many will follow you back. After a certain amount of days visit Refollow and their interface allows the Twitter user to Un-follow users by the hundred of the people that didn’t respond. This process can add to delusion to popularity. Even better is the paid program called Twitter Adder.
Twitter is the biggest psychological number joke that exists on the Internet.
In review we learn that the circulation numbers that FeedBurner posts are a delusion. In addition that numbers of Feedburner’s RSS subscription circulation can be easily manipulated. Page rank does not tell the total story and can display a lower number because of the code within the theme, and Twitter is the biggest deceptive number joke on the Internet.
Bloggers are staring to question what is Social Media good for?
To cause a delusional perception of popularity through numerology.
Psychologically people are effected from numbers. In the travel niche people can be automatically impressed with a high number of countries visited; however, some people that travel fast, hitting many countries for the sake of “numbers”, never can explain explain the depths of the cultural and other deeper dynamics, yet they can post a picture.
It must be a strange feeling when someone writes a blog post to their falsified delusion of 10,000 feed phonies on their site, but only 300 are Reached and their comments struggle to top 30. I can say one thing is that you will never see RSS numbers or Twitter numbers posted on Travel Enlightenment.
Related posts:
- Modernization of Amman.
- Link Transfer—Corporate Domination.
- The One Year Mark Nesting in Bulgaria.
- Hello WordPress.org, Goodbye Blogger!
Hello Shawn,
This is very good, although I am going to admit, I did not read this close, just scanned. Generally, the reason why this works for Feedburner or Twitter and all the other companies is because the Blogger want it. I thank you for admitting this as you see it.
I have finally put my Travel Blog on MailChimp.com and it tell me how many people opened the email sent, forwards, etc.
In my opinion, an RSS feed is no better than having a person bookmark my site, but I have added it again. What we want as writers is real readers, loyal, and regular and also the ability for this reader to send to friends.
By the way, as a second thought, I truly believe Blogging is being killed by Facebook as readers get their comment energy there…
Real readers subscribe by e-mail in my opinion, or buy the book.
Making money is complicated, but fun to learn the games, but sad to see how people support the games of companies like Feedburner.
Andy Graham of HoboTraveler.com in Rio Dulce, Guatemala June 2010
http://www.hobotraveler.com/blogger.html
Hey Andy Mailchimp looks good, I will be exploring the site. I like using the RSS, but I read everything through my Mac mail program, not from feedburner.
And I agree with the Real Readers, I would rather have regular readers than just fly by hits. I am going to try to get this blog away from feedburner but just don’t want to lose the regular subscribers.
Having a high Twitter follower count is like trying to speak to auditorium of 10,000, when know one is paying attention. Did it matter how many people were in the room if nobody cared?
If they are paying attention, that’s great, but using that as a engagement meter, I don’t think so …
Seth Godin wrote about this in his book “Tribes” which basically say, all you need is a small group of TRUE fans.
Great way of expressing the Twitter Concept:
“Having a high Twitter follower count is like trying to speak to auditorium of 10,000, when know one is paying attention.”
Great article, I learnt some new tricks from it, I think it summarises that you really can’t beat good old fashioned hard work though.
Unfortunately I think this might be a case of hate the game not the player. It is the way of the internet at the moment. TV companies do the same with viewing figures, yet how can they tell if their program is on a screen that is in some kitchen where no one is watching, or in a pub with 20 or so people looking at it?
With internet slowly taking over other mediums in the preferred advertising sector, Playing the numbers game to make money is going to be a big part of it. Fortunately there will also be people happy to just spread their message without chasing pennies to keep it going.
very interesting post shawn, but i am also sad to hear what’s going on in the travel blogging sphere.
To be honest I already experience in few occasions some hostility among other bloggers, focused more on making money instead than simple sharing their experience and support other travelers with insights and inspirational travels.
Hi Shawn, Glad to see that we are doing OK in your books:)
The code that we changed was actually a legitimate change. We were told that our blog was being read as two separate websites and we needed to change our code so that Google would read it as one website. A professional informed us that we should change this code as Google wasn’t giving us a fair read.
I believe that everything on the Internet is about knowing code. I don’t think that changing code on your blog is being manipulative it is being smart. You need to follow the rules to get the page ranks.
I believe that our page rank has grown because we post solid content every day (and I mean every day) I think that we have more content on our site than many older blogs because we do post every day.
We don’t claim to know much at all, but when someone gives us some advice, we take it and share it with our readers.
And our pagerank didn’t change overnight it actually changed over a few weeks.
Good informative post though. I believe that social networking is very important to sponsors and advertisers so we are going to continue to keep building our facebook and twitter.
After all, we just want to share our experiences with as many people as we can and hopefully make a living out of Blogging one day.
Thanks for the great information, there is a lot to be learned from this post!
Hey Dave and Deb, I was not referring to any type of manipulative action with the code concerning the page rank, I have read this a lot about changing some code within the theme that can keep the page rank down. There are some themes that are more code friendly such as Headway and Thesis.
I agree with posting regularly with content focused on SEO. I know of a very popular travel blog that cannot increase over 3 and I would think it from the Theme.
Hey Shawn, I know that you weren’t meaning that towards us and we didn’t take it that way.
But I just wanted to clarify to your readers that we weren’t being manipulative when changing code because some people might have.
People with a web background know how to use the tools properly and put in proper coding to optimize a blog effectively.
We don’t have an SEO or code background so a lot of mistakes are made on our blog. Luckily we there are some great people out there that take notice and offer us advice. We are still in the learning process, but it is slowly coming along.
It is too bad that Marta has experienced hostility because in our experience, travel bloggers are some of the most sharing, kindest and amazing people in the world.
I wish I knew more about how to get ThePlanetD more readers. The people with years of experience have ways of doing all the right things to make google notice them. But in a few years, hopefully we will find out the tools to get 100,000 readers a month ourselves.
Great content is number 1, but knowing how to be found among the millions of websites out there is very important.
It is a great post that we certainly learned a lot from.
Totally hear you on the numbers game. The Friendfeed count in Feedburner aggravates me, because it always involves my doing math in order to figure out how many subscribers I actually have. These days, tho, I’m content as long as the numbers are going upward, however slowly.
That said, I do still find social media to be an important part of my blogging experience. Not because of numbers but because of the connections I’ve made with people. Oddly, though, I’m not sure those people and I are as current reading each other’s blogs.
As for Twitter being the biggest psych joke on the internet…. I had to smile.
Thanks for this post
I agree with Rob’s comment, you gotta hate the game, not the players in these situations.
For example, it’s not the blogger’s fault that Feedburner decided to start counting FriendFeed subscriptions.
And yes, I agree that Twitter follower numbers lose relevance the higher they get. BUT, the fact is that marketers and PR companies on the whole (perhaps because they are not as web savvy…yet) are still attracted to big numbers. Can you then blame a blogger for wanting to be on the high end of the spectrum, and to that end, using a software program like Tweet Adder (which I’ve used to a limited extent)?
It’s not just a few travel bloggers going for big numbers — anyone in social media…any Twitterer with followings in the tens or hundreds of thousands, if not millions, is following the same course.
I think you did a great job exposing the wizard of Oz in this article, however I would hesitate to then beat him over the head with a billy club for playing the game well.
Interesting post, and useful for people unsure about what stats to look at. I’m confused as to how using Feedburner as it’s designed is manipulative though; and, really, why anyone would care.
Click-throughs, etc will be lower for longer-running blogs as people who subscribed three years ago may have lost interest in the topic but not unsubscribed. That has certainly happened to our feedburner and email opens/click-throughs, but that’s beside the point.
The numbers game gets boring really fast, and I think most travel bloggers would agree that they prefer getting feedback from new readers (and old friends) than just inflating magic numbers. The real question here is, who cares?
Even though you didn’t mention me by name, I’m clearly the person (along with Christine Gilbert) who you are attacking. One of the graphs you are using is mine and based on past comments you’ve left on my site, you clearly have it in for me. You have a blog which gets little to no traffic and are bitter towards those who do a better job at marketing themselves.
I resent the use of words like “deceiver”, “manipulation”, “delusional”, “liar” and “egotistical”.
What makes this so bad is you don’t even have your facts straight. You know enough to be dangerous, but don’t really know how Feedburner works. You have some half truths and some graphs, but don’t know the story behind them.
1) On June 17, 2009 Feedburner started added FriendFeed subscribers to their count. If you bothered to do a simple Google search on “Feedburner FriendFeed” you’ll see dozens of blog posts from that week in 2009 from people who were recording a big bump in their Feedburner number. I woke up to the same thing. That big jump had nothing to do with manipulation. Manipulation implies there was some sort of intent. I nor anyone else had any say in having their FriendFeed numbers show up on Feedburner. It just happened and it happend to thousands of people with FriendFeed accounts.
Both of the graphs you use where you claim deception and manipulation both had the jumps on the SAME DAY when Feedburner added the FriendFeed numbers. There is no deception or manipulation. It was all the result of the decision Feedburner made.
For the record, I agree that having FriendFeed numbers show up in Feedburner is stupid. But that was the decision of Feedburner, not mine or anyone else who uses the service. I had those thousands of FriendFeed followers before Feedburner made the change. Moreover, Feedburner never announced that they were going to count FriendFeed subscribers.
Nonetheless, for better or worse, FriendFeed numbers are a part of Feedburner. Nothing is being gamed. If Feedburner says that it counts, then it counts. Take up the issue with Google (who owns Feedburner) don’t start accusing other people of deception and manipulation. FriendFeed is just an online service (owned by Facebook), not a black hat network.
2) You are assuming Feedburner = RSS. It doesn’t. That is how it started and it is certainly a huge part of it, but Feedburner began to count non-RSS things like email newsletters and FriendFeed. Trying to use the green “hits” graph to show anything only works if you assume that the Feedburner number is only RSS, AND that every RSS reader is registering hits back to Feedburner, which many do not!
3) I use Aweber for my email newsletter. Feedburner counts their numbers. Aweber doesn’t show up on “hits”.
Here is the breakdown of my Feedburner numbers:
FriendFeed: 6,641
Aweber: 3,343
RSS: ~5,800
If you want to lop off the FriendFeed numbers, so be it. I do that mentally as well. I have nothing to hide. If I did, I wouldn’t make my Feedburner numbers public. I’d hide them. In fact, one of the goals I had for 2010 was to get 12,000 non-FriendFeed subscribers. This is something I’ve openly talked about before on my personal blog. As far as I’m concerned, an email subscriber is as good if not better than an RSS subscriber. Same with a Facebook fan.
4) I’ve never created thousands of email accounts or used any system to get email or RSS subscribers. If you look at my graph, except for the day they added FriedFeed, there are no major jumps. It is a relatively smooth curve. (I did get about 400 subscribers one day when my feed URL was posted on Digital-Photography-School.com) I have to pay money for Aweber, so I have no incentive to create fake email addresses just to have to pay for them. If you are going to toss accusations around, you better have some evidence. I’m amazed at how much you know about manipulating RSS as I didn’t even know most of the tricks you listed.
5) Since I’ve created my Facebook fan page, I’ve been seen a similar smooth increase in subscribers. I suppose you’ll come up with some conspiracy about how I’m deceiving people and manipulating Facebook too.
You don’t like me or how I blog. That’s fine, but you are going to start spreading lies about what I do, that is crossing the line. You seem very bitter and obsessed with me to have spent so much time pouring over my social media stats.
There is another simple explanation for all of this that you simply don’t consider: My blog gets a lot of traffic and I make it a point to try and reach out to new readers. Unlike most bloggers, I do actively market myself. I have a podcast. I do public speaking. I’ve done interviews with major newspapers. Is it really that shocking that I should have a lot of subscribers given all of that?
Spend more time on your own site and less worrying about other blogs and I think you’ll have more success.
Gary, why so defensive? I never mentioned, nor referred to your name nor posted your link. Each person can choose to post numbers however they wish, and will create their own perception how they may view information within a post.
Bullshit.
You are being coy. You didn’t have the guts to mention my name, but YOU ARE USING MY DATA!!!!
If you want people to make their own judgement, you would have just posted the data with no commentary. Instead, you clearly want people to come to your conclusion, which you state in boldface type: To show that numbers cause a delusional perception of popularity through numerology. You use loaded language throughout like “liar”, “honest”, “manipulate”
The only reason I knew about this post is because other people told me about it. If they are bright enough to figure it out, then clearly you achieved your mission. Throw dirt at me without ever mentioning my name. If you are using my data as an example, and then put “manipulated jump” next to it, no kidding I’m going to be defensive.
I’m defensive because you are attacking me. There can only be defense when someone is on the offense.
This entire post is offensive.
You seem to have problems with every type of metric on the internet. Guess what? There are problems with every internet metric, even Google Analytics and log files.
Your analysis of page rank just shows how little you know. Page Rank is determined by incoming links, not the blogging platform you use or how old your site it. You can have a million pages and whatever backend you want, but if you don’t have links, you wont get a high Page Rank. Or, if you are selling links, Google can reduce your page rank. The entire page rank metric is based on incoming links…. and yes, page rank isn’t perfect either.
If you are going to be coy and ask why I’m so defensive, a better question is why someone would take so much time to make custom graphics and research me? This is the behavior of a stalker. I’ve read plenty of articles online that talk about problems with various metrics. This isn’t one of those articles. You have an ax to grind. This is a smear campaign and a post filled with loaded language.
You accuse me, directly with my own Feedburner data of manipulating the numbers. You are a liar. I manipulated nothing. You know damn well that it was Feedburner’s decision to add FriendFeed subscribers. I had over 2,000 FriendFeed subscribers BEFORE they ever started adding the number. Thousands of bloggers who were active on FriendFeed last summer experienced similar increases in Feedburner numbers.
Tomorrow, if Feedburner decides to add Google Buzz to their number, mine will go up by 700. If they decide to add my Facebook Fan page, it will go up by 5,000. That is absolutely no different than what happened with FriendFeed.
Let me repeat, you are a liar. You know no one manipulated anything. Thousands of bloggers all didn’t manipulate Feedburner on June 17, 2009 all at the same time.
I’d also like to point out that my Feedburner data is open to inspection by everyone, including you for you to use in your smear article.
YOUR Feedburner data is private. ( http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/index.php?months=6&uri=http://feeds.feedburner.com/ClearlyenlightsTravelBlog )
What are you trying to hide???? If you are going to throw bombs at people and take the moral high ground, then why not open your data up to inspection???
Judge as you like Gary. Having the feedburner counter active makes it public, which is a personal choice. I choose to keep my private, I am not into numbers.
My feed numbers are low, but I am not pursuing the social media thing, nor trying very hard to gain many readers. My writing only attracts a certain type of reader.
And it was your choice Gary to publicize yourself, most people that visit my blog would have no idea whose chart is posted.
Many human reactions this post is causing I would like to point out. First some people have their feathers ruffled, unfortunately. Some people find it tempting to maybe start to increase their numbers. And some people are learning that high numbers posted on a blog might just not be the real deal. I find this somewhat Enlightening.
By the way if you want me to remove the charts and post another one I will. I know of tech blogger with 141,000 “Readers”
And also, if I am wrong concerning the page rank or whatever other subject, I have no problem with that because I always learn more.
Not surprised seeing Gary react. He is given to being over the top and defensive as you said. And he is prone to hurl accusations even when unprovoked.
Shawn – Gary is about numbers. And not just his “60 countries” shit.
Shawn, at one time Gary was following close to 80,000-90,000 plus on Twitter, ensuring that most would follow back like it usually happens before unfollowing almost 40,000-50,000 and quickly too! You pointed that out right. You should have seen the jump in his twitter activity adding thousands each week so they would follow back and they did
not knowing that Gary would unfollow them back 
I would not have noticed this if not for his frequent posts on his blog praising himself to the skies and saying how he is the most “popular” travel blogger around. You would imagine Gary roams around with a mirror held to his face all day long haha. Imagine someone so delusional to call himself “One Man National Geographic” and you will know what I mean.
Nobody would bother his blog if it wasn’t for his indirectly running down other travel bloggers on his blog, like his blog is great because he “gets” his “numbers”. He would have to be stupid to think someone would be jealous of his “one-picture-a-day” blog
Shawn. Gary needs his numbers to prove to himself his blog is good. That is because he knows inside what his blog is truly worth.
The joke was Time choosing his blog
They fell for his “numbers” like he probably hoped to. And thanks to you we now know how some will get their numbers haha. That Christine is his lackey – “Gary yes, Gary no”.
Finally someone wrote about this stupid number game. Good for you Shawn for pointing out this joke among the travel niche.
Phil is right on.
There is a nice web based tool available at globinch.com. This provides a nice statistics of your feedburner feed.. Check it out
http://www.globinch.com/2010/10/01/check-feedburner-rss-feed-statistics-globinch-rss-feed-tool/
and the tool is
http://www.globinch.com/feedburner-rss-feed-stats/
Great article Shawn.. I have to say I had my doubts about some of the feedburner stats numbers I’ve been seeing on some of the political blogs in South Africa… figures now given it’s so easy to manipulate the numbers as you’ve shown!
Unfortunately though it does take a certain critical mass of followers/ subscribers to encourage people to sign up too – users are more likely to do so if they’re not in the first 10 in line
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