Google Acquires RSS Platform with FeedBurner Buy
Google announced Friday that it will acquire FeedBurner, a company that distributes both content and advertising to blogs and other media Web sites.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but experts estimate that Google could be spending $100 million to purchase Chicago-based FeedBurner.
“This is an area where we saw a lot of opportunity and that was growing quickly,” Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management, said in a conference call.
FeedBurner is one of a handful of companies that have pioneered the use of RSS technology for delivering content to Web sites. It offers an analytics platform that gives Web publishers visibility into their audiences as a way to track the impact of advertising inserted into RSS feeds.
“If you are a Google advertiser, now you can advertise on feeds that you otherwise may not have had access to,” Wojcicki said. She added that Google will explore “interesting ways” to integrate FeedBurner’s tech platform into its Google Reader, a feature that aggregates users’ RSS feeds into one location for easy reading.
“By combining our market-leading feed metrics with Google’s market-leading site and marketing analytics, publishers now get a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience,” FeedBurner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo said in a blog post.
