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How a Hacky Sack Site Got 74,000 RSS Subscribers


We reported this week that, a site for fans of the niche sport that's sometimes referred to as hacky sack, unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most popular RSS feeds on Google Reader, with 74,043 readers. This, we hypothesized with supporting data, was due to's feed being selected as one of only 8 "default feeds" recommended to Google Reader users in the "Sports Bundle".

Except that the feed either didn't exist or didn't load, and there's a good chance none of those subscribers actually wanted to read about Footbag, since it was part of a bundle for people interested in the general topic of Sports.

So how does Google choose which feeds to put in its bundle? In a post titled "Want fries with that feed bundle?", Israel L’Heureux of the Assetbar blog looks at the WhoIs data and shows that the owner of is Steven L Goldberg, a Google manager. In the Mashable comments, meanwhile, different commenters describe Goldberg as "an employee of Google" and "one of the main developers of the Google Reader ".

So Google lets its engineers decide what to put in the default bundles, and even include their own feeds if they want: no big deal, you might think. Except that there are only eight default feeds in that bundle: is there a popular soccer news site, perhaps, that lost out on inclusion? And despite its non-profit status, Footbag runs Google ads: if any of those RSS subs turned out to be real, then would generate ad revenue from the referred traffic. Additionally, if they ever wanted to sell ads based on their "74K" count, they couldn't: nobody can possibly be reading a feed if it doesn't load (and yes, I'm aware that with all the attention it's getting, the site is likely to fix that feed now).

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