• by Tameka Kee , June 4, 2007

Google added the rapidly growing world of distributed content in the form of RSS feeds to its advertising arsenal with the acquisition of FeedBurner. The long-rumored deal was announced on Friday. Although terms were not disclosed, the price was widely reported to be $100 million.

FeedBurner, with 30 employees, has raised $10 million since its founding in 2004. It has created a platform allowing content creators to monetize their feeds with ads, and also offers detailed analytics that measure who is getting the feeds.

While the price is just a blip compared to the $3.1 billion Google is paying for DoubleClick, it is a significant acquisition because it gives Google entrée to the fast-growing online channel of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), widgets and other non Web-based applications. It also gives it significantly deeper blog penetration.

"FeedBurner has created an effective set of tools," said Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice president of product management. In addition to the basic distribution, it offers strong analytics, promotion and monetization capabilities.

"We think this will be a win for users, publishers and advertisers on the Internet," she said. "FeedBurner shares our vision for making ad and content distribution very measurable."

FeedBurner serviced 431,731 publishers worldwide as of Wednesday, according to Dick Costolo, FeedBurner CEO and co-founder, and is delivering 67 million subscriptions per day. In addition to independent bloggers and podcasters, it is a major distributor of RSS feeds for publishers such as Reuters and USA Today as well as retailers and travel companies offering subscribers feeds about their latest deals.

The deal will give Google AdSense advertisers access to this new inventory.

Costolo called the pairing an "almost too perfect" fit. "It's a natural fit given the spiraling complexity we're seeing in media distribution," he said in a conference call on Friday.

The idea is to integrate FeedBurner publishers deeply into AdSense and to create a highly integrated analytics package tying FeedBurner stats into Google Analytics, Wojcicki said.

At least one participant in the conference call suggested that publishers might not all welcome the deal because Google's AdSense program pays significantly less than FeedBurner's to small and mid-sized publishers.

"They will make more money with FeedBurner," Wojcicki said. "It will vary site to site and feed to feed. We'll figure that out as we go through the integration."

Questions about the content syndicator's independence as an operating company were left unanswered, as both Wojcicki and Costolo alluded to "ongoing discussions" with regard to the compensation models FeedBurner currently offers to publishers, fully incorporating feed statistics into Google Analytics, and whether the company would keep its name.

In acquiring FeedBurner and its media syndication analytics, Google has secured a channel that many advertisers are beginning to turn to with higher frequency to both listen in on and attempt to reach niche audiences.

"Today we find that clients are demanding to understand the return on all marketing investments," said Tom Quinn, executive vice president of marketing services for interactive agency Blast Radius. "Blogs and RSS feeds offer unique ways to listen to the customer and it will be interesting to see the metrics that Google/FeedBurner are able to produce. We hope that this merger provides new opportunities to effectively reach our clients' customers."