What Podcasters Need to Know About the Acquisition of FeedBurner by Google
Techcrunch has confirmed that Google is in fact buying FeedBurner.
Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million…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.
I’m a big FeedBurner fan and have friends that work there so I’m pretty happy about this news. Google is acquiring several great assets in this purchase:
- Data regarding RSS feed publishing, usage and advertising. By offering a quality free service for the past few years, FeedBurner has collected a huge amount of interesting data about how RSS is consumed and how publishers use it.
- The most dependable tech/system available for measuring RSS subscription metrics (not a simple task). FeedBurner has done a great job over the last few years really honing this.
- A large loyal base of users (bloggers and podcasters).
- A ready made system for a scalable RSS feed advertising service (think AdSense for RSS). The web is now decentralized. You can’t expect to always drive visitors back to your site to make money. More tools for RSS monetization will come out of this acquisition which is great news for RSS publishers looking to monetize their content.
Here’s how we benefit from this:
- FeedBurner is here to stay for sure. If there was ever any doubt, this should get rid of it.
- Maybe the five dollar pro stats will be free in the future (although five dollars is nothing to pay for this service).
- FeedBurner has done a great job of cranking out new features for publishers. I only see that accelerating with Google in charge.
Potential concerns:
- Will FeedBurner maintain the same transparency they have had for the last four years?
- Will FeedBurner maintain the same accessible and helpful service?
The track record shows that when Google picks up a service, things typically only gets better. So all in all I look forward to even more great things from the FeedBurner camp. Thoughts?
