Reasons why you don’t need to care about Feed Readers

The big craze in the blogosphere about having a 4 or 5 figure feed count has been on for months now, and I must say that I am almost annoyed with people making tireless efforts just to get feed subscribers. There was a time when people used to envy big feed counts of problogger and copyblogger ; but now even newbies have a feed count of 5000+. How they’re doing it? I probably need a laugh on this one but there are lots of ways to fake the subscribers count. Let’s list them:

• Add your blog’s feed a thousand times on the same account on Netvibes, each one of them shows up as new subscriber!
• A fake photoshopped picture of the feedcount making it look real.
• Putting someone else’s feed count chiclet on your blog.
• If it the feed count is in text, then you don’t even need to fake. Instead of putting the script you can put plain text of as many subscribers as you want because it shows up the same way in the source.
• One person makes up hundreds of email addresses and subscribes using each one of them.

That shows how easy it is to fake the subscriber count and why people should stop being impressed by the count or trying to fake it. I can guarantee on a 100% basis that at least 30% of the subscribers of famous blogs never even look at the feed updates instead the feed updates or email deliveries keep piling up until you finally decide to unsubscribe.
After you start a contest asking each participant to subscribe, hundreds of them do so and when one of them wins, what interest do you think those people or even the winner have in your feed? All they wanted was that fancy prize. I am not stressing on the point that providing RSS Feed is bad, or one should not use it  but that webmasters should not flaunt the big number because it is no more a big deal. If that is what your fame is depending on, then you’re on competition with the lowest category of the blogosphere which are the spam blogs.