Google buys FeedBurner

$100 million deal - locked

[amznVibe]

From Techcrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

[Brett_Tabke]

Is there another source on this?

[Hach3]

Here is an announcement on Google's blog.

[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

Also from FeedBurner

[blogs.feedburner.com...]

Google is putting together a pretty complete list of companies. It is kind of scary...but impressive at the same time.

[edited by: Hach3 at 6:48 pm (utc) on June 1, 2007]

[Fiver]

good buy. no question. this is exactly the kind of intelligent, sharp and focused company that you would hope the big G would buy... not of the cringeworthy youtube variety, imho.

[MikeNoLastName]

>Google is putting together a pretty complete list of companies. It is kind of scary...but impressive at the same time.

They apparently plan on eventually owning the entire internet. Then we can just rename it "Google-land".

[harpoon]

$100 million? Wow! Congratulations to Feedburner.

[OldWolf]

Adsense TOS update at 2008:

You can use any other advertisement with adsense cause its all belong to us :p

[amznVibe]

Correct me if I am wrong, but essentially the are buying the name/traffic - Google could have built a feedburner clone in a heartbeat - it's not exactly a complicated bit of programming.

I never did understand why people would use the service, since with proper caching you can serve you own RSS feeds just as easily, but I guess that's why they are having the payday of a lifetime and I'm not.

[venice]

Name, Traffic, Technology, and the ability to insert Adwords into numerous user feeds, delivering contextual ads directly into the end users feedreader.

I think it's a great move, not only for Google, but for RSS in general. The awareness of RSS tomorrow will become what Mp3 has today.

[Shiznaught]

I'm hoping someone can sum up in a few words what's special about feedburner. Also, should I be using it to increase the popularity of my blog?

[Marcia]

The best data is more data, and all your data are belong to us.

[bill]

what's special about feedburner

They were an early entry into the feed tracking and analytics field. They have a sizable customer base as well.

[peterdaly]

They provide a somewhat reliable subscriber count, which with a "roll-you-own" logging solution is difficult due to more than one user being behind a single bloglines rss request, etc.

The feedburner subscriber count has become the industry standard in subscriber counts.

[Marcia]

Recent Google patent application:

Ranking Blog Documents [webmasterworld.com]

The method of claim 4 wherein the one or more positive indicators include one or more of a popularity of the blog document, an existence of a link to the blog document in one or more blogrolls associated with other blog documents, tagging of the blog document, a reference to the blog document in other documents, or a pagerank of the blog document, and wherein the one or more negative indicators include one or more of a frequency with which posts are added to the blog document, a content of the blog document, a size of posts in the blog document, a link distribution associated with the blog document, a quantity of ads in the blog document, or a location of ads in the blog document.

It all now makes perfect sense. Don't you just love it when a plan starts to come together?

[edited by: Marcia at 1:06 am (utc) on June 4, 2007]