Feedburner: Show me the Money
BlogSecurity and hundreds of thousands of other blogs use the Feedburner service. A couple of weeks ago we released a vulnerability in Feedburner which allowed attackers to hijack your feed – this has since been resolved. Today, we will be discussing a hidden feature in the FeedCount service that may come in handy if your trying to determine the readership of a blog.
FeedCount is another cool way to promote your feed. It is a dynamic graphic that always displays your feed’s current circulation, as calculated by FeedBurner. Choose its color scheme and an animated or static appearance; it is yours to customize!
Why is this interesting? A FeedCount can really be beneficial if your looking at placing Ads on a blog. It can useful in selecting blogs you want to become involved in and much more.
So how do we do it? Simply visit the website and click on its Feed (i.e. http://blogsecurity.net/feed). Once clicked it’ll take you to something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogsecurity. Now, simply add "fc" (which probably stands for FeedCount) before the blog feed name. So the URL now looks like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/blogsecurity
Now if your a privacy madman, and you really don’t want other people seeing your FeedCount, simply login to your Feedburner account > Publicize > FeedCount > and Deactivate. All done.
This tip was published by Matt Hartley over a year ago.
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Comments
Marcin, cool addition to this article, great comment.
Does displaying your feeds increase/decrease/change readership? I’ve got a few comments on this and will require a serperate post me thinks.
[...] October 07, BlogSecurity released an article titled, "Feedburner: Show me the money". Knowing your way around Feedburner can be really useful when looking for blog partners or [...]
Also, if you belong to a network, like the Security Bloggers Network, you can go to:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/network/members?sort=4&id=###
and see how many subscribers each feed has for a network.
Now the thing is, does publicizing the number of subscribers you have improve subscriber numbers? My logic being: a visitor sees that there are quite a bit of people subscribed to a blog, it must be a good one, so they then subscribe to the feed.
Just wondering what your thoughts were on the subject.