Google announced their latest acquisition, FeedBurner, for an undisclosed amount after a week of speculation, although some rumors have mentioned the $100 million figure. FeedBurner has over 400,000 publishers in its network and will help to boost Google's AdSense portfolio of advertisers. FeedBurner is a Chicago-based company providing distribution and management systems for syndicated content, and they claim to share Google's aim to organise the world's information through focusing on feeds. The small start-up, established in 2003, is now a leading provider of syndicated content in the shape of RSS feeds - which now total well over 700 000, 112 000 of which are videocasts and podcasts. According to Nielson/Net Ratings, FeedBurner growth has been much higher than that of MySpace or Digg, with an outstanding rate of 385% traffic growth year on year.
FeedBurner distributes syndicated content to over 190 countries and its tremendous formula for success, which combines a large audience along with an advertising model on feeds, has caught the attention of the search engine giant. Among other things, FeedBurner notifies its clients when their content is syndicated, providing statistics over time. This type of service is also provided by Google.
This is the fourth company that FeedBurner's four founders have created together. According to Matt Shobe, one of the company's co-founders, its success is partly due to the complementary skill set of its team, with a strong focus on web development, usability and project management.
When FeedBurner was first launched, it was unclear if the advertising model and syndicated content would be appropriate, but it has proven to be a match made in heaven with over two thirds of its publishers using this advertising system.
This deal, closed at the end of last week, is the latest acquisition by Google in what seems to be a prolonged shopping spree for the search engine. Previous to the FeedBurner acquisition, Google also announced its buyout of the Spanish photo sharing company Panoramio, the software security site Green Border Technologies and the video conferencing software Marratech AB.
Before this, Google also splashed out on the information retrieval software Tonic Systems, which has the ability to extract information from Powerpoint presentations and save it to HTML or PDF format, and what has so far been Google's largest acquisition, DoubleClick, for an staggering $3.1 billion.
With recent accusations of monopoly being thrown Google's way, the latest deal with FeedBurner is sure to fuel the fires of Google's critics even further - although hundreds and thousands of people are likely to benefit from the enhanced system.
