How To Get Thousands of FeedBurner “Subscribers” Overnight
Remember when Shoemoney and I had that RSS competition to see who can get the most new RSS subscribers in a month? Remember how Shoe’s RSS shot up over 8,000 on the last day to beat me? Well, the video below is not how Shoe did it. He made me promise never to reveal his secret.
The 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 Netvibes account. Then it’s just a matter of creating an OPML file with your feed URL a few thousands times and pasting it into your Netvibes page. Apparently, FeedBurner reads each Netvibes widgets as a separate subscriber. So if you have 10,000 widgets with your feed URL in your Netvibes account, you’ve just increased your FeedBurner count by 10,000.
Now that this is out in the open (TechCrunch has blogged about it), I expect FeedBurner to close the loophole so I wouldn’t brother trying it.
- Posted in The Net
- 49 comments what's your take?
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I always astonished with you John… You just can manage all of your online business be success in every step you make. And this, make me wonder, how come just in one night could get thousands subscriber? really amazing.
Reply to this commentThanks for the tip, John.
I’ve inflated my RSS number to 5,200 and got 4 new advertisers since then. Cha-ching!
Reply to this commentThat is absolutely unethical. I really hate that there are people out there actually do this to make money. I think I’m just going to stick with being truthful to all my readers and the people that come to my website.
Reply to this commentI agree with you and I would never do this. But you know how a lot of moneymakers and big companies became successful - by using unethical ways.
Reply to this commentBut the good thing is: the good guys who dont fool and mistreat people will reach heaven and the bad guys hell. And in hell no money rulez…
I’m not that evil. I completely made up that comment above.
Reply to this commentI agree with you. And karma is a bitch. You can try & cheat now, but in the end, you will lose.
Reply to this commentJohn,
What amazes me is your traffic rank. It has plumetted. And mine is going bonkers soon to overtake yours. Can you at the least accept this as a challenge to get back on track?
It seems my desire of meeting you will be overshadowed with my traffic rank meeting and overtaking yours.
What do ya say?????
Reply to this commentChris
your site isn’t even a real site it’s just spam. and where you said “100k plus” it should be “100k+” its not the same thing. noob
Reply to this commentIf by traffic rank, you mean Alexa. Well, that just shows how worthless Alexa is. If you’re about to over take me, that would mean you’ve overtaking shoemoney already. Hope you have just as much luck overtaking his blog income.
Reply to this commentCan’t believe you even responded to that silly comment.
Reply to this commentI talked to a Astrologer he assure me that in april 2009 i will get lots of luck favoruing me and i will by pass you. I did paid anything to make these words come out of his mouth.
I have a lot of faith on him
. He is next NastroDam
Reply to this commentI like how as our Alexa ranking falls, our earnings grow. Explain that.
Reply to this commentSome people will always try to play the system and, like in this case, try to artificially boost their FeedBurner count.
Reply to this commentI guess you can fool people and make them believe that you have a lot of RSS feed subscribers, making them sign up too.
But if you don´t give them what they expect (good content?), they will unsubscribe right away.
It would be funny if every blog I read now all of a sudden gets their subscriber count cut in half
Reply to this commentSure Wilson,
Reply to this commentBut I think this hack is best for young and budding blogs. It goes well along with the dozens of fake comments youre injecting into each of your posts, don’t you think?
Eh. Pointless to share this. If they didn’t fix this loophole, which I’m sure they will, you would have helped to devalue subscribers and eventually make it pointless to even count subscribers.
Reply to this commentthat’s really a loophole of FeedBurner and if I were to do this, it’s like cheating my readers though…. Shoe is doing so? just to win the game… neh!!
Reply to this comment@GabrielLai: How does it cheat your readers? Your readers don’t care about the amount of subscribers you have.
@StartBlogging: It doesn’t invalidate the number of subscribers you have because you can use this advanced mathematical formula: (TOTAL SUBSCRIBERS) - (COUNTERFEIT SUBSCRIBERS) = VALID SUBSCRIBERS.
don’t even thank me. it’s a john chow dot com exclusive
Reply to this commentThis is not an honest way to get subscribers. I won’t use it.
And I can’t bear any cheat methods.
Reply to this commentGotta hand it to Shoe… thats pretty nifty. You gonna demand a recount?
Reply to this commentI said the video is NOT how he did it.
Reply to this commentBut did he cheat or are this 8000 RSS subcribers real ones? It wasnt so clear.
Reply to this commentAfter reading about this on another blog and saw it on yours I was immediately going to ask if this is how he did it, looks like you had anticipated that
Come on John, tell us! 
Reply to this commentHow do you think youre at 27k subs? Its my netvibes page that has you on like 26k times.
Reply to this commentIs that a fake Subsriber ?
Reply to this commentIncrease subsriber through Netvibes account?
wtf? Did you read thread?
Reply to this commentBtw, i not very sure about Netvibes account, but creating subscriber like that is not right, because you are lying peoples. I prefer get real subscriber.
Reply to this commentA true master don’t reveal his 100% secrets to his students. I think it is ok to keep secret but a big company like Feedburner who have some impacts on the value setting of any site’s advertisement, should really look into this flaw. I have seen Rockfuse wrote about the value of link ads is $0.08 per feedcount. So, by counting 10,000, the link value can be $800 for falsely created feedcounts. I think this is not good for business.
Reply to this commentNow every blogger that wants to show off will hack feedburner. FFS
Reply to this commentyikes! That is outright cheating! In India, we would call it Hera-Pheri!
Reply to this commentoh my god
who cares what you call it in India. for fucks sake
Reply to this commentYeah, I don’t know about this. Who really cares about “showing” a big number. The only numbers I worry about are on my incoming checks. (Wanna show me how to inflate that the same way overnight?)
Reply to this commentHaa , Now even a one minute old blog can have thousands of subscribers….its pointless to show your subscribers on the site until this loop hole is fixed
Reply to this commentHow about building great content and growing readers the right way? I have grown over 350 readers in just under 6 months and people like my blog. Do the same and you get results
Reply to this commentwow. that’s one killer bugger.
Reply to this commentThe whole “cheaters never win” comment comes to mind…
Reply to this commentwow that is so dirty cheat, he2 but who cares, your readers wont care about it, they visit just for your post ( but your advertiser will think about it
Reply to this commenti have problem with feedburner…my subscribers should shows 5000++ but today the count dropped to 104..
this is after i tried the technique using netvibes..
now applying to google to give back my feedburner count
shame on me…i blamed JC because he published this and i tried..shame u JC
Reply to this commentThis is lame. It’s obviously much better to get REAL subscribers. I don’t see anything great about faking your subscriber count because they’re not even real people.
It’s going to be funny seeing the cheaters’ chicklet count go down after Google & Netvibes sort this out.
Reply to this commentKinda pointless.. eh?
Reply to this commentaw damn, just when i started getting my first 6 subscribers… somebody goes out and figures out how to fake 6,000. but i’m gonna go ask shoe to tell us all how to get the subscribers up legitimately. i mean, w t f, we subscribe to your feeds right?
where are the consultants when you need them!!!
Reply to this commentFake it till you make it. I can assure you half of the trick ShowMoney used *IS* on the video. I’ll show you how he did it…
Reply to this commentAlso, ShowMoney and JohnChow figures will drop soon. Not because of this, but because now a lot more people got closer…so it’s just a mater of time. This is fun.
Amazing the waste of time, even reading this article. What purpose in having a bunch of faked anything. Are the 1000 fake readers going to buy anything?
Reply to this commentWell, whatever black hat practices one can employ to get the attention, in the end only those will succeed who are providing real value to their visitors and who are continuously using ethical means to jump up the ladder of success.
I think your blog is doing the same by providing enough value to the online community.
Keep up the good work.
Reply to this commentI’ve got a new blog, so of course need RSS readers, but don’t think I wanna try this. I’ll stick with the old fashion method: write good content.
Reply to this commentI think they fixed it. I tried the trick on one of my inactive blogs by adding some 20 extra “subscribers”. The first day, they showed up in the count. Now it’s back to normal and in my FB stats, I see only 1 subscriber from Netvibes.
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