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FeedBlitz Lost Over a Million RSS-to-EMail Subscribers Overnight

FeedBlitz, a service that lets you read blogs and RSS feeds like any other email message, lost over a million email subscribers in one day.

Just yesterday, Feedblitz website claimed to have around ~3.3 million email subscribers. (see screenshot)

feedblitz-yesterday

Today, that number has dropped by a million to around ~2.4 million email subscribers though the number of RSS feeds syndicated by FeedBlitz is fairly constant during the same period.

feedblitz-today  

Wondering why this mass exodus ? Did FeedBlitz publishers switch en masse to FeedBurner email. The reason is quite amusing - it was all because of one spammer who was probably using Feedblitz to publish MFA websites and splogs.

The spammer had opened several accounts on FeedBlitz under different aliases and when FeedBlitz decided to delete his/her account, their circulation figures dropped immediately by a third.

It's interesting that spammers could easily abuse the Feedblitz system even though they have CAPTCHAS and email verification in place.

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