Yesterday while I was working and chatting with a friend of mine Jean Costa we spoke about a website Lushable.com. They claim to have about 1000+ feed subscribers to their blog according to their FeedCount displayed on their website. This startled me cause they are a fairly new blog that just started in December according [...]
Yesterday while I was working and chatting with a friend of mine Jean Costa we spoke about a website Lushable.com. They claim to have about 1000+ feed subscribers to their blog according to their FeedCount displayed on their website. This startled me cause they are a fairly new blog that just started in December according to Alexa. Is it possible to get 1000+ subsribers in less than a month? Maybe by placing an add on BCC.com it might be. So I figured out what they did:
Firstly I checked if the feedcount was fake, but it wasn’t… Came directly from Feedburner’s website. Then I used a nifty tool called the Feed Analysis tool from Blogperfume.com. This tool helps you check any Feedburner stats that have their API enabled.
So I ran the report and concluded that it’s true. They have an average of of 1000 subscribers for the past 4 days. But check this spike!:
They went from the 3rd (132 subscriber) to the 4th (509 subscribers) to the 5th (1012 subscribers). In 3 days they got almost 1000% growth! Can you imagine what kind of traffic you need to your blog for that kind of spike in your RSS? You will also see on that graph that they have no views or clicks and a few hits. Weird for a blog with 1000 subscribers he? So I decided to have a look at their Alexa ranking if they indeed had a 100 000 visit spike for those days:
As you can see there was no spike or any major traffic heading their way. Strange… Another special feature on this tool is a history viewer. So I compared it to http://www.adii.co.za’s feed:
No clicks, no views and look at their hits. Naturally your hits is more than your readers like adii’s. They actually have less hits than readers and it’s cause they subscribed themselves! They probably created tons of different accounts and subscribed like crazy animals. According to Blogperfume’s tool this is how their future looks like:
LOL, sounds good he? This is just proof that too many bloggers rely on their Feedcount to get more traffic and visitors. Maybe I am wrong and they got it legitimately?
I think they did it to get advertisers maybe… Here is a pic of their advertise page: (lol it’s funny)
I wonder why they have a xxxxxx everywhere…
How do you think they got it right?
Credits:
Adii - Hope you don’t mind me using you
Blogperfume - For their handy tool
Feedburner – We love you!
Lushable - For making me laugh
90 Responses
We recently acquired a popular blog and then found out it is possible to take an existing RSS Feed and move those readers to your own feed. That is how we grew 1500+ feed subscribers in one day. We also got mentioned on Techcrunch which got us 600+ feedreaders in one day. We ended up with a few thousand feed readers within 48 hours. No hacking or cheating involved…
Wow, this was a great article from start to finish. Hehe, I think people ar very conscious about their feed stats. I feel mine is too low to have a button on my site stating how many I have
.
I will start publishing my feeds to directories as I haven’t done that. I don’t think I will grow my feed 1000% in a couple of days though, lol.
@Boris – I hear what you are saying but, what about the fact that they have almost no hits at all. The hits compare to when they had 40 – 80 subscriber. Still it all just looks very suspicious…
Yeah Philip, you’ve got a point there! Di you ask them to comment here too? Would be interesting to hear their side of the story…
Very nice article.
Yes, you are right. Apparently, they lied about their RSS readers numnbers. I am sure they have subscribed many times themselves, because it is impossible to have so low hits when you have 1000+ readers…
I have managed to get 800+ readers in just more than 2 months and you can see my hits have about over 2,000+ as well.
http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/?uri=blogperfume
If they did fake their subscribers to get ad revenue then they are in for a shocker when nobody continues to advertise after the first week or month.
True, but maybe the advertisers pay up front. I looked at all options and I can’t see how this can be legitimate.
Don’t think the comment I posted via my mobile worked. This is definitely a dodgy situation, there is NO WAY they’d have that many subscribers with no hits, lmao!
How exactly would they subscribe over and over for their own feed? I don’t see how that is possible..
Great post bud!
I think they created 1000 emails on their domain and then subscribed to the feed 1000 times using different email accounts. That’s what I think…
Phillip – totally! I would like for them to come and explain here!
I definitely noticed this myself when the owner sent me a PM on a forum asking if i could comment a bunch of his blog posts in order to get into some directory. I commented because I like commenting on blogs
I didn’t think for a minute that they achieved 1000+ RSS subscribers within the month they had. I mean, I have less than 40 subscribers and my alexa rank is around 300k. (for 1 month of work).
I believe they did it for the advertising spots. If people do not do their research then they might see the 1000 RSS subscribers and jump right in and buy an ad spot. Very sneaky.
I’ve posted a comment on their blog linking to this post, so let’s see if they take notice..
Just to clear this up, I don’t want it looking bad on my blog. We launched the site less than a week ago. We’re still working on the design and been building buzz around forums. The first few days we launched we were marketing heavily and we have been running contests for people to subscribe to the feed and to win a prize at the end. We ran the contest and it did very well and we will be doing more. Contests are perfectly accepted, we offered cash prizes and will be offering gadgets as prizes in the up and coming contests.
for other RSS contests, please look at:
myblogcontest.com/tyler-cruz’s-300-rss-contest
Even the big boys Chow and Shoe
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/10/17/shoemoney-1300000-rss-contest
So look, we’re basically running contests since we launched a week ago.
All i can say is, thanks so much for the link bait.
Thanks for the response Jason. The only issue with your argument is that according to alexa you had no way nearly enough traffic to generate that amount of new subscribers.
EVERY visitor literally had to subscribe 5 times to be able to pull that off. But hey, that’s just my opinion…
Jason.. nonsense, show us proof of your competitions and not Tyler’s or Jeremy’s or Johns, where is your proof? We’re not idiots, we know about competitions for increasing subscriber signups, lol, I think you’re just a flat out LIAR!
Based on the hits, it’s impossible for you to have such a feedburner subscribership, or am I wrong?
Link Bait.. well yes, but then again, who’s going to enter a competition on a blog which is being spiked at for lying about their information? Sometimes link bait and high traffic works in an extremely negative way, you’ll see.
Best bet.. find proof for us and we’ll let go.
Hi Jason, isn’t this a great example of how conflicts are born? There wouldn’t have been a story if you and Philip would have talked earlier. Then the title would have been “great way to attract feedreaders: make it a game and offer a reward”.
Of-course, then I wouldn’t have found THIS blog and I wouldn’t have found Lushable. So I guess everybody wins. Except me, so now go and visit MY blog and subscribe to MY rss feed TOO!
[...] Read the full article.. [...]
Boris.. I’m sure he can spare one of this 1000 email addresses to subscribe to your feed! rofl!
http://imod.co.za/index.php/2008/01/10/lushablecom-lies-to-our-faces-busted/
LOL Chris! It was a good plan, I mean if it wasn’t for Blogperfume’s handy tool he would never have been caught out. Unless his feedburner API was disabled… <-Clue
Yeah its a really good marketing strategy, its a shame he didn’t email or anything and just assumed “Something cant be right here?” We have more contests coming, as i mentioned to the owner of the site in an email we have cash prizes of around $500+ and 1 contest is a video iPod, we will have many more coming. See we here at Lushable really like Feedburner and RSS as technology, its great so we try to promote using these services with clever marketing plans.
By the way Boris, i’ve subscribed to your RSS feed as i like your past comment, I also subscribed to the AffiliateLounge.co.za feed since the “Thanks to Lushable.com for making me laugh” comment, that made me laugh
Its actually a good article, i appreciate that.
Ok, so I will get info for the Chris M guy, also could i bring up TechCrunch’s 600k+ RSS which most are filled up with the default feeds from Yahoomail France right??
1,000 entry’s to the contest isn’t really that much, for the iPod and other contests we will be launching in the next few months will gain us hopefully thousands and thousands of subscribers.
Phillip – Not all users may not have the Alexa Widget installed, we get most of our traffic from Internet Explorer. The Alexa rank is very poor yes, the site is a week old.
Hehe, where’s he gimp gone?! Jason, come represent yourself gimp boy!
Jason.. you’re so lost, I’m loving this!
Phillip – you rock! Classic midnight humour!
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=643583
Here is another RSS contest.
Chris M your blog is down cant read your article.
Who’s asking me to show my face?
@Jason – Actually I did email you after I posted this article. Cmon, if I emailed you I might have missed out on all this fun cause you prob would have removed your Feedcount.
I love the way he talks to us as though we have NO idea about online marketing!
My blog seems just fine.
1000 readers, sorry Jason, but you’re going to have to work it to get us to ever believe you bud!
Ah i get so many emails to the emails listed on Lushable. It was Chris M who commented accusing me of lying ect..
Its all cool, we take this stuff lightly, its all good, just lying and accusing isn’t.
RSS contests are great, we have a 25,000 credit etrecard contest running pretty soon which we hope will do pretty well for buzz.
Jason.. prove to us that you have 1000 legitimate RSS feedburner subscribers!
If you’re running all these competitions, surely your feed stats would be fluctuating? It’s been on 1014 for many hours now?
Cool, send us a link for the competition?
Good idea, perhaps we’ll blog it
We have just ended 1 contest, we’re running another one launching soon. We ran our last contest a few days ago and its done pretty well.
We will have more very soon. Chris M
How about more proof!
Lushable : 0
Bloggers : 1
Until later
Mr. Jason Bates,
First of all, get to the answer and stop going around it. You can stop all this controversy by showing proof. By checking your backlinks on Google, it doesn’t seem like anyone posted about a “CONTEST”. Even if you have someone come forward and tell us that you ran a contest, it is hard to believe you. Even blogs that are running $200-1000 contests are getting triple the visitors you’re getting at Lushable. Here’s a site you should also check out, http://bloggerunleashed.com/ . That blog started about 1 month ago and with 750+ subscribers, his alexa rank is proving it. Jason, just end this and start out new, you’ll be given another chance.
-Mike
LOL, it clearly looks like Jason is avoiding showing any kind of proof.
Here’s their compete.com rankings showing 1083 visits up till Dec 7. It’s a little better than their Alexa but still not enough to warrant 1014 subscribers.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/lushable.com/?metric=uv
You mean:
Lushable: 0
iMod: 1
Well done Chris
Dont bring the whole blogsphere into this
I found it interesting to read how you investigated their feed – useful for future reference.
Hey! Good article! You know so many tools!
I think they probably used something like buyrefs.com to generate the signups. You pay a fee and then people get paid something like 1 cent to go to your site. I tried them out in one of my first entries and although they delivered, it’s certainly not quality! The bounce rate is like 97%! They arrive from about 4 or 5 sites according to my stats. You can choose to buy visitors or signups! I think they bought 500 signups for $119. Who knows though!
Keep up the good work!
-Bec
Yeah its a cool way you can check out all the tools and stuff for seeing how many clicks come from peoples feeds.
SEO Rob Says:
January 10th, 2008 at 2:54 am
LOL, it clearly looks like Jason is avoiding showing any kind of proof.
Here’s their compete.com rankings showing 1083 visits up till Dec 7. It’s a little better than their Alexa but still not enough to warrant 1014 subscribers.
?????
We launched well after the 7th of December, we launched on the 30th!
>>>> Why would getting the rank from before we even bought the domain name help?
Its like getting number of the amount of fans at a baseball game which isnt set to be played for 5 years??
By the way whats BCC.com? ?? Whats that?
I mean, its just a parking page for a pr4 domain name with no traffic. anyway did you mean BBC.com? Well…. In England we dont see ads on the BBC’s website, we pay monthly to have an ad free TV and Web service.
Bec your wrong,
Here is how it works.
Lushable feed contest, subscribe to Lushable’s RSS feed and click confirm in the email you get then PM me the verification page via the forum.
1 entry per member.
Prize $500!
Done, there, that explains 500!
Same again ect….
So please, stop assuming, speculating and stuff. We will be running some more RSS contests in the future, next 1 is in a month.
Thanks
In my opinion, Bec’s comment above is comment spam. Her comment contains an affiliate link.
She wrote a comment on this post just so she could insert her link.
@Mike Huang – Thanks for pointing out the backlinks to their blog, I didn’t think of that
@SEO Rob – Great! More proof of their traffic. If if every visitor subscribed, the jump happened in 2 days…
Ah, shot down!
I included the link because I had it, I don’t even recommend using it!
-Bec
Lol, it’s fine but thanks Richard
I checked compete on my domain and it gave a totally incorrect answer.
Yes, that’s the problem with most online rank/link checkers.
They mostly look at one source to get their data. So it’s better just to use stats for yourself like Google Analytics.
Yes, my analytics shows much more visitors. However, the stats package I check daily is WordPress stats. It’s even managed to edge out awstats. I used to check those religiously and now I don’t bother anymore.
What I find amazing, though, is that no stats package agrees with any other. No matter how many different ones you install and use, they will each generate unique stats. The only thing they agree on is trends. They’ll all go up and down together, but they will all give different numbers.
On a tangent, is your blog supposed to look like shoemoney.com? It bears a resemblance.
Maybe my layout yes, I just saw now. But then again Shoemoney’s blog’s layout is common. I go there a lot so maybe it got stuck in my mind when designing mine? :=
I don’t know why every other stat program gives different results. It must have to do with their “algorithm” of detecting and marking traffic and figures. You said WordPress Stats, what’s that?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
WordPress stats are da bomb!
Your design is a rework of Adii’s wp-polariod, I see.
Cool, yes I downloaded it, and modified it before I really knew much about CSS and wordpress. But now I can do themes from scratch, just takes way too long! I like his CSS style, it’s easy.
It seems that this page should also have a link, linking to it, on his advertisers page
Ok, to conclude this whole story
Jason, let’s say you are telling the truth:
- Why don’t you have any hits on your graph while other feeds have at least double their subscribers?
- Give us links to previous competitions?
Hope to hear from you
[...] to heated up about lushable and their cheating RSS feed count. Thanks to Phillip for posting this whole sagga. The comments are firing up here and here, and from these comment feeds came [...]
Firestats for Wordpress is a very handy dashboard accessible plugin for Wordpress.
We’re going off topic – Jason, where’s our proof!?
http://imod.co.za/index.php/2008/01/10/imodcoza-takes-down-lushablecom/
[...] Feedburner Hacked? [...]
Interesting conversation.
Absolutely esvl!
I see his blog commenting is back on
Ah, nice one
who do you think they are fooling?
i believe..
it’s their own self
I’ve used FireStats, but I found it buggy. Also it chews up loads of space with its log files.
Jason – what happened to the feed count? It halved? Hmmm Hmmm
Buzz buzz buzz…faked or not, we’re all talking about Lushable. Nice linkbaiting.
True John, but negative traffic is bad, just takes a little time for it to show
Ohhh… Its down to 500 or something? Surely that is more link bait??
hehe,
Negative traffic ….. Its traffic at least..
Lol, a bad mindset to have about traffic Jason. When you get into the real world you will realize that your reputation is a very important element in the growth of your business. So no, small traffic is better than negative traffic.
Most of the traffic from this blog and mine will simply pass by yours. Your traffic will spike for a couple of days, but will drop right down again, except that your reputation will travel with the parting visitors, you’ll see.
One solution: Admit that you tricked the stats or prove them legitimate. simple.
Look forward to hearing..
Me too, would really like to find out how he did it?
[...] kinda of quality content I will be receiving from the website. Currently, the featured article is Feedburner Hacked?, I must admit, the style, and the way this article is written, is top notch! You can tell from [...]
[...] to his own feeds excessively or buying them. Unluckily for him, his acts are being exposed on Feedburner Hacked or just plain Cheating!? and Lushable.com lies to our faces, [...]
[...] Feedburner Hacked? [...]
What a tool. I see his Feedburner is at around 80 now, but the advertising page hasn’t been edited yet
The guys that developed that nifty tool Blogperfume, wrote a post about the whole RSS faking. Check it out: http://www.Blogperfume.com
OMG.. that was worth a good laugh.!
[...] spike was picked up by iMod and AffiliateLounge. Lushable had managed to accumulate over 1000 RSS subscribers in less than a month. Everyone on [...]
Still so much movement over this topic, I love it!
[...] like you guys to check out Phillip’s success in catching a blog trying to pull a very huge RSS count scam. Although this method is pretty effective, you may also want to back it up with details before [...]
[...] example of some of his brilliance is here.Head on over, and take a look for yourself. Indulge in Phillips knowledge and learn. You will not [...]
FeedBlitz also has a bug at the moment which is causing some subscriber counts to go out the roof. I saw mine go from 115 to over 700 in 24 hours. It was then supposedly fixed, the number went back to within the normal range, yet it happened again. You can read about the bug on FeedBlitz, I haven’t seen an update from them since the original report, but it’s still occurring. No, I’m not cheating, in fact I’ve never used FeedBlitz so I’ve never had a subscriber from there. It’s happening to quite a few bloggers-so check around before accusing people of faking RSS numbers.
@Beth – ROFL, you should have read all the comments before making a comment like that. I know about the errors that occurred, and it wasn’t in that time. We had enough proof to make a statement like that and I’m sure Lushable would agree. But thanks, I make sure of the facts before I post anything like this
Hahaha, that’s classic! lawl
Thanks for bringing my attention to that blog. They have a fun play ^D^D^D^D interview there now.
I’m sorry for not reading all 70 comments, but I’m aggravated because I’ve been accused by several people of gaming FeedBurner. That’s why I said do some research because I’ve had to personally email the accusers and show screenshots of my stats and the notification on FeedBlitz regarding their little bug.
No problem Beth, I understand.
1000 RSS-Feed Abonnenten durch Manipulation?…
Feeds werden in der Blogosphaere nun auch schon manipuliert, so wird im englischsprachigen Raum berichtet, ueber einen aktuellen Fall “Lushable.com”.
……
Great article, but you have to remember not to rely so heavily on the Alexa rating because it’s not accurate. I mean, I know someone that gets like 500 uniques a day and they’re ranked better than someone that got 10,000 in one day… but the 10,000, a lot of them don’t have the Alexa toolbar installed or anything… so it’s hard to determine.
But overall, great article! Very interesting, fake or not… I mean, the subscribers that is!
Jay
DatMoney.com
Yeah! The count was faked. But my story is worse than that. When Jason was yet to launch lushable, he contacted me on my blog and told that he wanted to hire me for blogging on Lushable.Com. He said he likes my writtin and will pay $0.03 per word and 50% bonus. He said he will make payment every week. So, I wrote 7 articles in the first week and my work accounted for about $100. When the payment came, he didn’t come on Skype where we used to chat. Since that day, he never answers any IM, even though he is online, and never answers any emai. Now that a month has passed, I researched about Lushable and came to this page. Guess what, he still mentions me on “Authors” page (Uzair Nazir). I don’t want him to pay me now, but I would like to say him “Best of luck” with your fake life.
@Uzair That sucks man! He also contacted me for advertising, said he wanted to go huge. Guess what, he never came back…