As many of you notice, various bloggers have a small image that displays their subscriber number to their viewers. It also has an RSS subscription link included. This widget is great to show your readers the amount of growth and development your blog has gone through. In addition, new readers will see your subscriber count and judge the popularity of your blog. Seeing your feed numbers increase is a definite motivation tool, and sometimes people decide to display other people’s counts as their own.

I Want 437k Subscribers

The website in which this whole scheme is based upon is TechCrunch. If you did not know, their feed widget displays 437k and is (as far as I know) the highest number of subscribers anywhere. In order for your blog to obtain 437k subscribers, all you need is a couple minutes. However, to the advanced reader, this is easily detectable and will usually be the reason that they will refrain from visiting your blog in the future.

A Little HTML, A Lot Of Subscribers

The idea behind this little exploit, is to display another’s feed count as your own. This can be done with anyone’s feed count, but why not go for the gold? Anyways, if you right click on the image itself and click “Copy Image Location” you will notice something like this (when you paste it):

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/Techcrunch?bg=FF6600&fg=000000&anim=0

The “FF6600″ and “000000″ are the source colors for the image. These can be changed once you place the code within your blog, and you can format the image accordingly. Now that you know where to copy the image from, I will explain to you how to copy the image into your blog. Whether or not you currently have a FeedBurner chicklet, you will implement the code as follows:

<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>

And now, thanks to a little exploit, and a little typing, your chicklet will properly (haha) display 437k. Since this is the exact same image code as TechCrunch, your numbers (if you continue using this exploit) will match theirs directly as they fluctuate up and down.

Pros And Cons

Of course doing something like this is wrong and I would not recommend it. However, some people think that if they display a feed count larger than their own, readers will be more apt to believe their material, and visit their site more frequently. Also, to some people it may provide a false sense of success and inflate their ego a little.

On the downside, if you are “caught” doing something like this, your credibility goes way down, and your readers will second guess your material. After all, if you copy another blogger’s feed count, why wouldn’t you copy their material as well?

Overall

I have noticed this on numerous occasions, and more often than not these bloggers who claim to have subscriber counts in the 10k+ range, have been blogging for less than a month. If you would like a little insight, I would recommend taking a chicklet that displays a more realistic count for the time you have been blogging.

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