Google buys Feedburner to sell ads into RSS
No wonder Google has acquired RSS management service Feedburner. FeedBurner publishes feeds for PC World, Computerworld, Macworld, Reuters, USA Today, AOL, Newsweek and many many more big and small publishers. That means the bulk of the content from these sites passes through Feedburner, and what does Google love? Content and data, but especially eyeballs. According to TechCrunch (following an unconfirmed rumour on Vecosys) Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million in cash. Google has effectively bought Feedburner to get into the RSS Ad market. The growth market for ad inventory – though still small outside of the tech sphere – is increasingly found in people reading site content via start pages like Netvibes, RSS services like Bloglines or RSS readers like NetNewsWire. These people never visit the actual sites, and yet their content needs to be monetised somehow. This is a threat to AdSense, which only appears on sites, not feeds. The answer? Buy a service like Feedburner, which had already set up its own advertising service. Bully for them.