Recently, aVirtualExit wrote a post on how to check out the number of subscribers of any feedburner link, if they have not displayed it in their site. He actually stated this method to find out the number of subscribers for personal use for those who don’t display it in their sites. There was a big discussion on the net whether to display the feed count or not. Many voted for not showing the number of feeds due to the psychological factor that people won’t subscribe if the feed count is very less. Dosh has collated all these data in his post ‘Studying the Impact of the Feed Count on Blog Feed Subscriptions‘.
According to aVirtualExit, you can view any blogs feedcount by using the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/(feed name). By this method, anybody can view anybody’s feed count even if it is not displayed in the site. When people subscribe, nobody is going to view this and then subscribe but you may want to keep the number of subscribers private and not want others to find this information. In that case you can block this by changing the feedburner settings,
Go to Publize tab -> Feed Count -> Make it Deactive.
Now your feed count will be kept private and only you will be able to access it though feedburner homepage. I have gained more than 100 subscribers in a very little span of time and I would be displaying it after I get 1000 subscribers. If you still not have subscribed, you may like to subscribe to Lyte Byte’s full feeds.
Nice trick. Thanks for sharing, although as you mentioned, i think that the fact that people will be able to peek into my feedburner subscribers is not a big deal
I meant into my feedburner subscribers count of course.