Dodgy Web and Blog Stats: Redux

As we all know, web statistics are an unreliable thing at the best of times. I posted on this issue back in March 2006, noting that Urchin and web server stats can be used by people to grossly exaggerate their statistics. Well now Nik Cubrilovic has posted on a similar story, this time involving Feedburner subscriber figures. The blog that Nik refers to has been a concern for quite some time, as it claims to have hundreds of thousands of RSS and email subscribers – and (imho) a similarly inflated page view count. These exaggerated web stats are helping to sell ads on that particular blog, which of course puts honest blogs (like mine) in a bad position. And frankly, this kind of thing reflects badly on the web content industry as a whole.

Thankfully, as Nik points out, Feedburner addressed the issue and the RSS subscriber stats of the blog in question are now showing the correct figure. I can verify that I checked this myself, before said blog removed access to his Feedburner chicklet. The rightful figure is less than 30,000 – not quite “hundreds of thousands” I think you’ll agree.

It’s great that Feedburner fixed this issue quickly (and thank you to Pageflakes for also working it out), but really this kind of web stats exaggeration has to stop, for the good of the industry. While Google is trying its best to stamp out click fraud on CPC ads, there is a more subtle fraud that can be perpetrated by fudging your web stats – either through quoting outlandish Urchin or web server stats, or by other means.