How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day

The FeedBurner chiklet is one of my favorite blogging addons (I guess it could be considered a widget). It keeps track of the amount of daily subscribers and displays it in a nifty little image that you can put anywhere. It also has a nice RSS subscription link included. The point of this little tool is to show your readers the blog’s growth and development over time. Furthermore, new readers can see the amount of already subscribed readers to get an idea of the age or popularity of the blog which often dictates how long they stay around. It’s also not a bad ego booster and motivater for the blogger.

When you have a nifty little tool like this, however, there are going to be those who try to manipulate it. One way I’ve seen someone do this is by copying another (more popular) blog’s chiklet code and replacing the link with their own RSS.

Anyone Can Match TechCrunch’s Subscriber List

TechCrunch (as far as I know) has the biggest subscriber base out of all FeedBurner feeds. Right now Arrington has 283k subscribers, and all it takes is 5 minutes and you can too (at least as far as your visitors will know). Keep in mind that this *is* an exploit and is very lame.

How it’s Done

It’s not a complicated task at all; in fact, I’m surprised it’s so very easy. All one has to do is copy the image code from another blogger’s chiklet, change the colors/text if they like, and insert it into their own FeedBurner script. Just right click on the FeedBurner chiklet, and hit “Copy Image Location” (in FireFox) and paste it in Notepad or whatever. It should look something like this:

The URL leads to the real feed’s chiklet image. You can then change the colors and text on the chiklet simply by modifyinig the hex code for bg and fg. You can also change whether the image is animated or not as well as adding “&label=Readers” (or something along those lines) to change the displayed text.

You then just put in TechCrunch’s FeedBurner image URL like so:

[a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourBlog"][img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TechCrunch?bg=003333&fg=FFFFFF&anim=0" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /][/a]

*Replacing ][ with ><

It’s that easy. Now you have 283k subscribers (for today). The number will fluctuate same as TechCrunch’s. If you just photoshop a chiklet with a high amount of subscribers people would get suspicious that the numbers were always the same. With this exploit it looks entirely natural.

Why Would Someone Do This?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should do this. It’s extremely lame. Don’t try to fool people, just be honest. I can, however, see the logic behind someone wanting to use a more popular feed image.

Showing a larger subscriber count than what your blog has naturally makes your site seem more popular which unfortunately makes new visitors more likely to stick. Just as having a blog with “No Comments” written all over it, showing a FeedBurner chiclet with no subscribers can be just as bad. It turns people away in many cases.

On top of that it’s a great way to stroke your own ego.

Conclusion

This isn’t a horrible exploit or anything, but it does make the chiclet a lot less valuable in my opinion. One could simply replace the image with a more popular feed whenever they wanted, and most people would never know. After all, how often do you view a blog’s source or copy image locations at random? The only reason I saw this exploit being used was because I noticed someone who asked me for a blogroll link a few days ago was having the exact same RSS spikes as me (due to a Digg). I thought that was odd, so I checked out the chiclet image URL. Sure enough he was using my chiclet. I’m not going to call this guy out, that would be mean.