There’s an odd story developing that involves Pageflakes, a customizable Ajax home page product, and FeedBurner. BoingBoing was first to report this after noticing that their RSS feed count went up substantially from Pageflakes. Over 2 million RSS readers were counted from that service alone. It appears that someone may have set up some sort of bot to create Pageflakes pages with multiple RSS feed modules on each page for a few blogs, including BoingBoing.
But a second source of Boing Boing RSS readers has skyrocketed lately – from a company called Pageflakes. We frankly don’t believe that nearly two million folks have decided to subscribe to Boing Boing via this relatively new service, and we suspect someone (or more specifically, somebot) is taking advantage of the service for some kind of spammy reasons.
The net effect of this would be grossly exaggerated RSS feed counts, which could affect the advertising rates that a blog or other site using RSS feeds could charge. It seems pretty clear BoingBoing has absolutely nothing to do with this, and is working to fix the problem. But other sites are affected, too. Whether one of them is behind this or not is unclear. In an update to the BoingBoing post, a reader said that it may have been nothing more than a bug. That seems unlikely, however, since a bug of this scale would likely have been flagged and fixed.
Either way, this isn’t good publicity for Pageflakes, which struggles behind Netvibes in the customized home page market. And it may be worse news for FeedBurner. If their RSS stats become meaningless, one of the main reasons for using them goes away.
We’ve checked our own Pageflakes stats and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Let us know if you are seeing an issue on your blog or site. You don’t want to be caught in the middle of this if it turns out to be fraud.
I had the same problem once, my Feedburner rank was at tens, but in one day it jumped to 60 or something.. Feedburner was saying me most of the readers are from PageFlakes.. The next day it was 10 again and I never had the same sudden inflation anymore…
I used to use PageFlakes alike services. I thought they were cool at the first beginning. But now, I seldom use them anymore.
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It doesn’t seem that odd to me!
If you go to pageflakes homepage (you must be logged out) you will see they now have a Boing Boing feed reader on their start page. That means everybody that isn’t logged in will see that feed reader and eventually use it.
That could be it, although TechCrunch is a default feed on Netvibes, which is bigger than Pageflakes, and we only see a few thousand RSS readers per day coming from them, not millions. I think BoingBoing is right to question this.
Don’t these sites cache the most common feeds? Does Netvibes cache and Pageflakes not? Can’t be – surely not every Pageflakes load causes a hit on Boing Boing (or Techcrunch). That would seem irresponsible to me.
Apart from just increasing the stats, could this also lead to some kind of click fraud?
I experienced a boing boing problem on my pageflakes account about a month ago. Every couple of days, my Boing Boing feed would duplicate, and I would end up with anywhere from 4-10 feeds on the homepage of my pageflakes account. I would then have to individually delete each of the boing boing accounts until I finally unsubd from the feed altogether.
I developed a site similar to Pageflakes, but it was for internal use in my organization. I tried various feeds on my site and it works fine. I am sure they must have goofed at some place and they will fix it soon.
Feedburner is a great company but I’ve always taken their RSS stats with a grain of salt. I had a feed that regularly listed 50,000+ subscribers, but then one day My Yahoo stopped reporting subscribers correctly in their log breadcrumbs, and poof, 30,000 people disappeared. So far, Yahoo has not been able to fix their reporting. That’s the biggest problem with Feedburner – they have to rely on such log-line reporting methods from My Yahoo and other services that cache feeds and report sub numbers in the log hits.
maybe they can boost my rss subscribers and I can charge outrageous prices for ads!….j/k
I personally don’t think it’s Feedburner’s problem, but unfortunately they have to deal with the consequences. Pageflakes needs to fix this, pronto.
What really annoys me is that one of the blogs benefiting from these ridiculous subscriber numbers is actively using them (along with equally inflated page view figures) in its promotional material and on their sidebar. It’s gotta be put to a stop – if not by Pageflakes, then Feedburner.
Strange to see this now (!) on Techcrunch after it has been known and dicussed with the appropriate people a long time ago.
1) It’s an old and known issue.
2) It has been discussed with the guys from BoingBoing and we have from day 1 looked into it to fix it.
3) It was indeed related to the default feed on the Pageflakes start page which at that time was a BoingBoing Feed.
4) It does not affect any other feed count.
5) It was a bug which we fixed together with the help of the Feedburner and BoingBoing guys.
Best regards
Ole Brandenburg
I had a similar experience to Andy when I tried out Pageflakes as well – before I logged in, there was a BB feed on there. When I created an account, there were 4. I made a couple of tabs – seeing how quickly I could replicate the setup I already had in netvibes or google personalized home page, and the same 4 feeds were on every tab. I don’t know if this is what’s happening, but I was hitting BB 12 times per refresh myself for a while… perhaps other people are having similar issues.
I do know that Pageflakes won an award for their product, perhaps the new press to them is causing all of the people who try the service out to hit BB consequently?
By the way – if we really need to start a discussion on so called “fake numbers” then I recommend we start looking a bit closer at some of the communicated signup numbers and active user stats reported by various players. It surprises me that a single RSS feed issue gets so much attention while other – much more obvious “tweaking” of numbers – remains unnoticed. Makes you think, doesn’t it? However, I do not see any value in this blaming game at all. Lets focus on features and services instead of pointing the finger at anyone. We all know that technology never works perfect so lets all keep in mind that behind every startup you will find dedicated, hard working people who try their best. It amazes me sometimes to see that all the positive things remain taken for granted while a single mistake draws so much attention.
Happy Holidays
Ole Brandenburg
The sites likely do cache the feeds, but they could be accessing the 1×1 pixel images used in the items to do feedburners tracking.
Very strange. We’ve been dabbling with some statiscal capability at Feedpass but have not implemented it yet as it is difficult to do without taking control of the feed, which is what FeedBurner does. I have to agree that if the statistics from FeedBurner can’t be trusted, most bloggers would have little reason to turn their feeds over to FeedBurner when they could use a tool like Feedpass to provide an easy subscription landing page, without turning over the feed. Also, Feedpass has dropped all advertising on our pages, removing some of the previous concerns voiced by users.
Ole, as I said on my site I don’t believe this is about BoingBoing’s issue (I could be wrong) but inflated numbers in general. Instead of viewing this as an attack against Pageflakes, why not take the opportunity to educate users?
For example, I have screenshots where both Netvibes and Pageflakes allow the same feed to be added multiple times but Bloglines does not. How are those multiple feeds counted by Pageflakes, as one unique visitor or three pulls to the feed? How are numbers reported to FeedBurner?
People are eventually going to ask these questions with sites showing numbers in excess of 300K subscribed users. It would be a benefit to all to have an open discussion and if there is an issue, resolve it and move on.
Ole, it’s not just BoingBoing. There is one blog out there claiming 400k + subscribers, which is over 3 times more than Techcrunch! This particular blog doesn’t even feature in the technorati top 100.
Also I don’t see this as an attack on pageflakes, but it’s definitely a ‘bug’ that needs fixing asap – because these stats are just plain ridiculous, which reflects badly on feedburner and pageflakes if not fixed.
Ole Brandenburg: A few things –
1. The issue of PageFlakes misreporting stats is not just with BoingBoing. See Richard McManus’ comment above… I think I know which site he is talking about, but even if I don’t, that makes at least two more sites. So no, not just BoingBoing.
2. The problem, as of right now (4:48pm PDT), is not fixed.
3. I could say more but I am sworn to secrecy.
Just be diligent about fixing this stuff before talking about more features and services and everything will be fine. As far as I know, there is no organized mob out to get PageFlakes.
Paul. The subscriber numbers aren’t a cache hit/miss rate. These are just the number of people reading the feed. Surely pageflakes is only fetching once on behalf of all their users.
Kevin
Kevin, it appears that Pageflakes is NOT only fetching once per user, and is reporting each instance of a module on a page.
interresting,
I have noticed the traffic to my site from Pageflakes increasing dramatically in the past few days. Coincidence?
Richard – I know what you are talking about, good to see that it’s not only me who noticed this funny situation.
I’m not sure if my buddy Pete’s Mashable.com 415k subscribers is inflated, maybe he’s just big in Japan
Ole said:-
“Behind every startup you will find dedicated, hard working people who try their best. It amazes me sometimes to see that all the positive things remain taken for granted while a single mistake draws so much attention”.
Well just add “Not me Guv, we wuz framed” and it will go away!
Bye, gone thataway!
The same thing has been happening on my Nintendo Wii (http://www.wii.tv) blog for about 3 weeks now. Our RSS subscribers would skyrocket for just one day, with all the new “subscribers” coming from Pageflakes. The next day all those subscribers would disappear, only to turn up again a week or so later.
It wasn’t as extreme as Boing Boing (we’d go from 60, about our normal rate, to about 140), but it was still clear that something funky and incorrect was going on.
Ole made this comment,
re 6: I don’t really understand the negative attitude towards the monetization problem – I’d rather call it challenge than problem anyway. A fee (let it be monthly or yearly) with an easy payment method – even Paypal if necessary – would certainly be an option. Even old school advertising could work perfectly for Web 2.0, since you acquire endless amounts of user specific data, click-flows and category specific usage.
As far as I am concerned the “monetization will be a huge problem” talk is rather pointless since you could apply that to pretty much any new business, not just Web 2.0 projects/applications. The key is to have a site that users like and – well – use. That’s the real problem. And please nobody tell me that a site with huge amounts of traffic and category specific modules will struggle to earn money. That would simply be poor execution and would be independent from Web 2.0
Cheers Ole
comment added :: 2nd January 2006, 00:19 GMT-05 :: http://www.pageflakes.com
Is there any way that a company like Feedburner could counter technology like this? Maybe they should throttle feed expectations – not allowing the counter to go up from reads sourced from a certain point over an expected amount each day.
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