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?