Google Inc. has announced its acquisition of FeedBurner Inc., a service focused on making money from the steady stream of information flowing from blogs, podcasts and traditional news sites.

Published: 03 Jun 2007

Google Inc. has announced its acquisition of FeedBurner Inc., a service focused on making money from the steady stream of information flowing from blogs, podcasts and traditional news sites.

As per the information available, the acquisition will give Google access to FeedBurner’s network of 431,171 current publishers to add to its AdSense network, and will provide a greater level of access to advertise on blogs and news feeds.

“The two companies share a vision of making information available to users whenever they want it. FeedBurner does this with RSS feeds and blogs, and is a complement to our mission of doing that with search,” said Susan Wojcicki, VP product management for Google.

“FeedBurner [offers] publishers services for distributed media; that’s been our mantra since day one. The overlap between our focus on distributed media and analytics, direct promotion and monetisation, with the depth that Google provides, is too perfect,” said Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner. “We are both trying to provide the same kind of thing to the marketplace.”

According to media reports, Google will allow FeedBurner to remain based in its current Chicago headquarters, but hasn’t made a decision on whether the brand will be retained.

Although FeedBurner is a small company, the buzz about its service has been steadily building as it helped distribute ads through the rapidly expanding universe of bloggers, podcasters and other sites that send out headlines and links through Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.

“Financial terms of the long-rumored deal weren’t disclosed _ an indication that the acquisition price wasn’t large enough to dent Google’s wallet, which is bulging with more than $11 billion in cash. Previous reports about Google’s plans to buy FeedBurner pegged the sales price at about $100 million,” reported AP.

It is being acknowledged that Google’s FeedBurner acquisition may just be the tipping point that leads to widespread adoption of RSS and advertising in RSS feeds.