Crowd
Photo by James Cridland

As you probably know, FeedBurner allows you to display the FeedCount, a small widget (chicklet as they call it) that shows the number of people who subscribed to your blog. It’s a known fact that bloggers (and people in general) tend to follow a crowd, so having a significant FeedCount can determine a snowball effect on your subscriber number. On the other hand, choosing to show a small FeedCount can drive people away. That’s why it’s better to show the FeedCount when your blog has a consistent number of readers.

I used to have a plugin installed, that allowed me to display the subscriber count as plain HTML text, instead of the FeedBurner chicklet (for design reasons). I deleted that a couple of days ago, because someone on a forum told me people could be thinking that I’m faking my subscriber number. That would have been hard to believe, since that number is 17. :) But I removed it anyway.

What determined me to write this post? Well… I was browsing one of the blogs that I subscribed to, when I noticed the content is not all that great, yet the chicklet showed about 150 subscribers. Sorry, but that’s the truth. So I right clicked and noticed the guy was using the RSS feed from another blog. Needless to say I’m no longer subscribed to that blog.

So I’m asking you: is faking subscriber count worth it? Is there something to gain? If people do subscribe because you seem popular, won’t they unsubscribe when they will realize your content sucks? And another thing: if you are using someone else’s RSS feed (and not a static image) to fake subscriber count, why not use Problogger? I mean… if you’re faking it, why not aim high? ;)

Don’t know about you, but I would rather have my 17 loyal subscribers, rather than faking a crowd.