Google To Drop $100 Million On Feedburner
According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Google is in the final stages of acquiring RSS publisher FeedBurner for a rumored $100 million. Feedburner is one of the most popular RSS publishing tools on the web, particularly in the blogging world (as a matter of fact, this blog’s feeds are handled by Feedburner).
In addition to bloggers, FeedBurner also publishes the feeds from a number of enterprise companies like Reuters, Newsweek and AOL. Currently, Feedburner claims to be handling over 720,000 feeds from over 420,000 publishers.
Feedburner is more than just a publishing tool though, the site is also one of the best ways to track your feed readership and it seems likely that Google will at some point roll Feedburner’s statics into Google Analytics.
Another likely outcome of the acquisition is the integration of AdSense into RSS feeds. If Feedburner has a weakness, it’s that the company doesn’t offer many options for bloggers and other publishers to make money off their feeds.
The Google acquisition means that Feedburner now has the Google advertising juggernaut behind it. Expect RSS-based ads to become more common in the near future.
So far Google has remained mum about the purchase and TechCrunch says that there are still couple of weeks to go before the deal is finalized, but in the mean time, what does the acquisition mean for the rest of us? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
