BenBishop.me.uk

Well according to a number of sources and specifically Techcrunch it seems Google has acquired the simply excellent Feedburner.

As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.