A lot of people believe that the true way to quantify the popularity and success of a blog is by its number of RSS subscribers. The argument has two parts: traffic numbers are easily inflated and anyone who subscribes to your RSS feed is obviously a fan interested in what you have to say.

Well, my friends, let me tell you about the reality of RSS subscribers. It’s just as easy, or even easier, to inflate your subscriber count than it is your traffic stats.

I’m going to tell you about two of the easiest ways I can think of just off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are other means as well.

FeedBurner Is The Key

I love FeedBurner as a service but it’s a bit limited in how it distinguishes real subscribers from robots and scrapers. The easiest way to artificially boost your subscriber count is to just submit your feed to as many RSS directories and search engines as you possibly can. As the spiders and bots from the directories periodically crawl your site they will boost your count. It’s that simple.

Things are even easier to manipulate with FeedBurner’s Subscribe By Email feature. Here again FeedBurner has developed an easy way to cheat their own system. Any Entrecard user can hop over to the shop right now and find people offering to subscribe to your blog via email for a fee. You could take this farther by just setting up dummy email accounts on your own domains and subscribing to your feed as well.

You’d be naive to think that this kind of stuff isn’t going on at some of the blogs you read everyday. It’s especially tragic because a lot of blogs are using their RSS subscriber counts as a stat to justify/explain their advertising costs.

How Do You Really Measure A Blog’s Success?

I’m not entirely sure.

Dosh Dosh made the argument last month that the best metric to measure a site’s success is in dollar bills. I suppose that is a valid point if you are coming from the viewpoint of blogging as a means to “make money online.” In the web site auction world, income is especially important because site pricing is based on multiples of monthly revenue.

Every conceivable metric for a blog or site can be manipulated. I can pay for traffic. I can buy PageRank. I can make automatic splogs to build back links. The list is endless.

In the end, maybe money is the best way.