Shopping Continues: Feedburner in the Google Cart

The company Google officially announced the acquisition of Feedburner  - a service that provides services for RSS-feeds management, collection of statistics and the placement of advertising in them. The price of the deal has not been announced, although it is rumored to be approximately $ 100 million.

The main objectives of the acquisition are set out on Google’s corporate blog - to provide web publishers with more opportunities for disseminating information, and advertisers - more advertising sites. The Feedburner development team has joined the ranks of Google, work is beginning to integrate the service with other products of the new owner.

It can be assumed that the Feedburner developments will be used in Google Adwords (advertising on RSS), Google Analytics, Google Reader and Blogger (stream optimization, RSS statistics, and possibly even blogs in general ). Feedburner technologies can improve blog search, especially given the factors that influence its relevance .

Along with technology, Google “acquired” also large customers: Feedburner is used by Reuters, Newsweek (which, incidentally, is part of MSNBC), The Wall Street Journal and others, not to mention a considerable number of blogs, including Techcrunch, the most popular reliable rumor. Feedburner is currently able to advertise in more than 430 thousand RSS feeds.

It is worth noting that at the moment Feedburner has no competitors in the field of RSS management and advertising in it (the latter closed in January this year ). This can be attributed to the complexity of creating statistics collection technologies. However, the most important question remains about advertising. Its placement is the main source of revenue for the company, but:

1. In the case of Feedburner, the term “targeted advertising” is limited to only targeting a group of blogs or a specific region;
2. even Feedburner himself, in addressing potential advertisers, admits that advertising will be placed in an area where it is almost absent. Not the largest number of users is ready to see ads also in RSS.

Both the first and second problems can be partially solved by Google’s achievements in the field of contextual advertising. However, one should not expect a “massive attack” of ads in usually free RSS in the near future, especially in Russia. The prospects for the Russian blogosphere and the Blogus company , which represents Feedburner in Russia, are rather vague in this case: the few stand-alone bloggers admit this, and this is also evident from general trends. In RuNet, blogs prevail on collective platforms like LiveJournal, LiveInternet, etc .; the owners of these sites independently “monetize” their work using the simplest way possible - placing banners, RSS ads are not interesting for them due to the scanty number of “external readers”.

On the whole, the new acquisition looks to be one of the most logical and consistent ones, at least because it fits into the general concept of the new owner’s development. The downsides (if you can call them that) are offset by the fact that Google is one of the world leaders in technology - and will certainly make every effort to prepare its omelet . No wonder today the company's shares for the first time since the beginning of the year returned to around $ 500.