How did John Cow manage to get 8294 more subscribers in one day?
I was browsing the web today and came across a post on JohnCow which revealed the identity of the new owners of the popular making money online blog, which has changed hands about 3 or 4 times in the last year or so. I read a post on JohnCow about a month ago and the blog had around 3,000 subscribers so I was surprised to see that the count today stands at 5,992.
I was curious as to how they got this growth so I checked FeedCompare and noticed that on July 24th the number of subscribers jumped from 3,737 to 12,031.
The next day the count dropped to 8,917 and today it stands at 5,992. No doubt it will drop again tomorrow and get closer to the true count of 3,500-4,000 subscribers.
I remember ShoeMoney’s count jumped in the last day of his competition with John Chow though I don’t recall how he achieved this. His count also decreased after the competition so perhaps JohnCow used the same tactic. I’m not entirely sure how this was done though I am a little curious 
Have you seen a blogs subscriber count make such a big jump like this?
Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes ClubPosted on July 27th, 2008 and filed under Around The Blogosphere
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13 Responses to “How did John Cow manage to get 8294 more subscribers in one day?”
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I’ve never seen an RSS subscriber count jump like that before, pretty impressive. Of course it’s already obvious they wont be able to keep those numbers up.
I would die for numbers like that…maybe someday. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to have found your blog today. LOVE IT!!
Cecelia
http://www.coolbabykid.com
good catch. not sure why such a jump would occur other than some e-mail, ad campaign, promo, etc.
You can get fake subscriber bots……
mecca – Thanks, glad you like the blog
Link Building Bible – No doubt there is software available to increase subscriber counts but that doesn’t explain why it has continued to drop after the spike.
Your right this is strange. I am interested to see if anyone else can explain this.
Nothing sneaky going on here
What we did was we finally announced the change of ownership and we emailed our other lists about it as well. Because we have other good size mailing lists we were able to get a pretty good jump. You should see another good jump today.
The other component… which i highly recommend you try out, is we are using Aweber, which allows feedburner to track subscribers and aweber emails the list when our rss feed updates. We created a solid incentive for people to subscribe via email instead of just rss. This is powerful because now we can also communicate directly to our readers about things we do not want to post on the blog.
Hoe that clarifies things a little.
John – Thanks for dropping by and clarifying. I have read a few articles about the benefits of using aweber however since the number of subscribers dropped so much after that initial spike, I really did thing some kind of dodgy tactic was used (I was wrong to assume this but as I mentioned in the article, the only other time I saw such a large spike and drop in feedcount before was by shoemoney).
Thanks for the tip with AWeber
No problem… I do not blame you for the skepticism, there are services out there that will actually create fake subscribers for your feedburner and make it look like you have more then you actually do. We are sending out another email today and I suspect that tomorrow (since feedburner is 24 hours delayed) we will see another jump.
I also subscribed to your blog.. you got a pretty good log going on here.
Thanks, glad you like it. I read your post the other day, it seems like JohnCow will finally start heading in the right direction. I was aware that the guy who created it was, as you mentioned, not as experienced as some other people (though he did build up the blog well). In the past my opinion on JohnCow was mixed – previous owners have got involved in spats with other bloggers and throw mud in a lot of posts, ciriticism is good but some of it came across as just childish insults. I also believe that there was a lack of substance in the past – like there would be one really good article or tutorial that went into a lot of detail and wouldn’t be out of place on a top blog like smashingmagazine – it was then followed by several posts about competitions and what not.
It will be good to see what you guys do with it. I know that historically all posts have been written by the alias ‘JohnCow’ however I think it would be good if you guys just wrote under your real names. I don’t think that readers would have a problem with this and it would help people relate more with the authors. I think that having 3 or more people writing under the same name (JohnCow) is a bad idea as each author has a certain style and they will have their own views on a subject too.
There is only one writer for the blog… but three owners
Oh right, that’s a different story then
Maybe it is possible. Not for you and me.
The contest that Cow is having plus his identity revealing post must have contributed to the subscriber jump.