$100 Mil for FeedBurner?
Recently, there were rumors that Google plans to buy FeedBurner for $100 million. And even more recently, TechCrunch has posted that an insider confirmed the acquisition.
Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. 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.
My first thought when I read this: What? Only $100 mil?
I’m thinking a hundred million buckaroos might be too small an amount for such a web app that’s big in the blogging community as FeedBurner. Sure, FeedBurner is mostly a silent player when it comes to blog software. It’s not a blogging package itself, and it even works behind the scenes, burning your feeds for your readers, and then giving you statistics when you need ‘em. But it’s this ubiquitousness that I think makes FeedBurner valuable. It’s the data that they are able to gather about blogs and bloggers that is powerful. Sure, Google can index your blog, and Google can even track your searches. But FeedBurner can track which blogs are popular (by the subscription metric), and which topics are popular (by the number of clicks on an item).
So it’s not just the potential Feedvertising business and traffic that Google is buying into. As usual, they’re buying into the rich warehouse of information they can mine later on.
At any rate, my congratulations go to all who are involved. It’s not as big an acquisition as, say, YouTube. But it’s big enough.
What’s next? WordPress?
Finally someone among all the ‘must blog about this’ bloggers, who has a slightly different take.
Yes the reason why GOOG wanted Feedburner is not the ads integration, they couldn’t care less about ads in feeds. But feedsyndication.
In a period where more and more designers and SEOs use nofollow for feeds, to stay out of the supplemental, GOOG might lose important data to boost its blogsearch. And knock out Technorati. Google has a ping service for blogsearch, but also a sitemap ping service, so there might be double listings. Feedburner’s pinger will allow GOOG to index, and sort out (personal) blogs, even better. But also clean up spam blogs from its blogsearch with time (expect GOOG to buy Askimet for this too, but not Wordpress.com that’s still for YHOO :P)
And jsut as you wrote, metrics. Popular feeds will continue to hit the SERPs, all the rest will disappear more and more in the supplemental index, but have to rely on Blogsearch.
franky said this on May 24, 2007 6:54 pm