Photo author: Somewhat Frank

As of late there has been a bit of talk about the practice of fluffing up your RSS feed subscriber number. The discussion was apparently sparked by a video showing how to get subscribers quickly by simply setting up a custom page on Netvibes.

I wonder: what would be the actual use of this? Say I wanted to show I have 1000+ (fake!) RSS subscribers… what would that bring me?

Traffic: Zero, the subscribers are fake.

Income: Zero, again, the subscribers ARE fake – unless you can fool some poor advertiser to let you do a review for him based solely on the number of people that subscribe to you

Notoriety: Same as traffic – not really happening…

So, that takes care of the big three things bloggers want. What’s left? Not much, really. You could it up to a certain point, direct relevant traffic and hope the little button Feedburner gives you to display on your blog (which by now should be showing a decent number) will convince a number of actual, real people to subscribe to your feed. This is a “maybe” situation which may or may not do anything significant to help you along.

The catch? There might or might not be one. Feedburner, who is owned by Google (also known as “We own the internet, Inc.”) might eventually crack down on this practice. One thing they don’t like is being made fools out of. On the other hand, there’s really little they can do to find out if the blogger himself is at fault here… anyone can set up a page or twenty on netvibes.