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Feedburner Sale to Google Confirmed
Techdirt is reporting that the rumored sale of Feedburner to Google has been confirmed. "Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years."
Back in the Web "1.0" days, VCs would never have settled for a payout that small. In fact, they'd rather have the company die - they were in the business of hitting grand-slams, looking for the billion(s) dollar(s) payout.
This is "only" 10x. Does that mean that VCs have come to their senses? Anyone have any insight into this?
They are getting $100 mil and they probably dont leave their parents basements all that much anyway.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
And I thought when I quit Wal-Mart and got a job at Feedburner that things would change and they would let me go home at night!! Shit!!!!
Google already gets my feed itself through feedfetcher and it is one of the few subscribers to my feedburner feed. It also subscribes itself to several other feeds (bloglines).
I don't see what good it does Google to own this company.
feedburner just isint that valuable.. period... unless you want advertisement in feeds
I googled techdirt, and I searched their blog, and there's nothing about google and feedburner, take a look:
http://www.techdirt.com/search.php?q=feedburner
So I'm betting scuttlemonkey typo'ed it, and it's actualy techcrunch, as the link says.
Please correct the summary.
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Eat my dirt.
It seems Google as acquired a lot of these marketing/advertising/blogging sites. What does this one offer the rest didnt or google couldn't develop themselves?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
.... In 3 - 2 - 1.....
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
It's rather obvious that these two companies are buying smaller ones with high growth. What will happen with the freedom of speech, when these giants are "buying the web" ?
:(){
I think this an excellent move by Google. They are going to be able to leverage Feedburners stickyend methodology to promote brick-and-mortar businesses....no they just bought out some competition like a budding monopoly. Wait did I say budding? I meant existing.
A firm that pays very generously to the highly qualified (in traditional academic terms) to snap them up and squander their research, while growing by buying up moderately successful, established firms for peanuts and pouring in the capital.
Wait, were we talking about Microsoft or Google?
Excuse me if this question is dumb but what exactly does feedburner do? I just don't get it.
For all of the macho recruiting process that Google is known for, and for all of the accompanying swagger, the reality is that Google's employees are unable to deliver beyond the patented PageRank search algorithm produced by Brin and Page and the patented Overture advertising system that Google licenses from Yahoo. That is why in the space of just a couple of years, Google has been rapidly buying up companies, from Keyhole (the original creators of Google Earth) to YouTube to DoubleClick. There is nothing technologically shattering or innovative about YouTube, so it speaks to volumes that Google paid such a large amount of money to acquire it. Every dollar spent on an acquisitions is a public admission of the incompetence of its internal employees.
What's so weird is that, as with YouTube, Google is buying traffic. Not revenue. Not technology. Traffic. One wouldn't think that Google needed more traffic. More revenue from its traffic, maybe, but more traffic from free services?
Google, according to Alexa, is #2 in traffic, and Yahoo is #1. But Google isn't far behind. These buys look like a desperate attempt to displace Yahoo as #1. Whether this make economic sense isn't clear.
Interestingly, Google traffic takes a dive every weekend, as does Feedburner, but Yahoo traffic does not. Look at the Alexa graphs. That gives a sense of how much work-related use the site gets. Slashdot, incidentally, has a strong weekly cycle, much stronger than Google.
It's still not clear if Google's expansion beyond search will be seen a few years hence as a good move or as corporate megalomania.
I use Feedburner heavily for various blogs and podcasts; and if you asked me a year ago about the Google take-over, I would have said great (or, who cares?).
But since then I've seen too many half-assed Google projects (especially around rss feeds: the Google reader for example is terrible compared to a competitor like Bloglines). Google recently redid the presentation of the statistics service they aquired (Google Analytics), making it worse. Feedburner is currently a great service that is intuitive, innovative and easy to use. But when Google gets through with it, I fear it too be half-assed.
As it has no doubt been said by others, Google is shaping up to be another Microsoft: using its dominance in one area (search), to force consumers into using inferior products. Google is doing it though by "killing with kindness" -- buying up the innovators and strangling them, rather then Microsoft's heavy tactics.
Could the slashdot janitors erm I mean "editors" please do their job and maybe link to wikipedia or something that explains feedburner.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
who doesn't see what the big deal is with RSS feeds? Or doesn't see why they need to be included in every little application (like safari, firefox, thunderbird, etc).
Usually when I am *online* and want to look at the news from a site... I don't grab their RSS feed, I just go to their site...
It seems like an okay way of exchanging information between different sites in a very limited fashion, but that doesn't make it important or worth spending a lot of money on. It's just one more xml schema for doing something really simple... I don't understand the hype.
I think this is a pretty good move on Google's part. They just acquired a large number of publishers that check the service daily and really care about their feed. The feedburner software and service runs VERY well and serves a real need. I wonder if they settled for too low of a purchase price, but I don't blame them for going for the cash. Lets hope their analytics gets bundled into google analytics for some really powerful (and hopefully free) stats.
The big reason for using FeedBurner, however, is that it can automatically add Google Adsense adds to your feeds, allowing you to easily generate revenue if you have a large enough audience. There are a number of influential bloggers who don't like this service, however (and other aspects of FeedBurner as well) - see Relevant Links below for more information. So Google now has bought the best RSS broadcaster that already serves Google ads (and the review is from 2005).
Why not just make your RSS feeds static content to reduce loads and just deal with it on your own server? XML is just a scrap of text and serves fast?
Another way of thinking about it is for sites that don't change much. Imagine I have 50 friends who have websites that I want to check. Most of my friends only update their pages a couple times a month, but that means that on average, two sites are updated a day. I don't want to load them all every day, only when they change and RSS gives me the ability to know when they have changed.
5 years ago, I could surf for hours at a time. Now, I have read all the aritcles I want in about 30 minutes a day and still keep up with stuff just as much.
It's the only thing I can think of.
DNA just wants to be free...
...lag behind Clicky which provide a better analytics service. But Feedburner is the RSS champ and Google would want to exploit it with Ads.
I don't know but since that question come up in every /. discussion about big corporations purchasing smaller companies, I advice you to look there ;)
Also: Google has huge brand recognition, until today I didn't know that feed broadcasting was big business. Now I do because Google paid $100m .... and who do I know that now does feed broadcasting ? So if I was actually a webmaster that earned some bucks from ads & was thinking about RSS - I'd now go straight to GoogleBurner. I don't even bother looking for competitors (who might be marginally better) as : It keeps things simple for me: I just have to hold one concept in my head "Google good: Google has good products, Google finds the new good products ". Given this brand "synergy" effect I'm surprised they got away with a 10x deal.
Although I do not know what a feedburner is, I would like to formally announce (if any Microsofties are reading) that I am their #2 competitor with great things coming down the pipeline. My product leverages the newest mashup technologies to provide a very compelling value proposition, at an outstanding ROI, with an incredibly low TCO.
You can have it, with no strings attached for 200 mil. (US $ naturally)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Feedburner has made great inroads in brokering advertising in RSS feeds. Google could easily reproduce what Feedburner has done, but in snatching Feedburner they also keep them from other prospective buyers.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Great. That's another new Google account I have to nuke to keep my personal stuff off this juggernaut. Methinks I need my own php/mysql server on the net somewhere so I can just write and host my own stuff.
really, google looks like a blackhole, where nothing comes out from
t ely-seeking-JotSpot_1.html
Desperately seeking Jotspot
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/17/Despera
when are we going to seek Feedburner?
If you have IE 7 or FF 2.0 open the URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/slashdot/slashdot/. That's a RSS feed.
Although, if Google allowed me to search through my rss feeds I wouldn't need to download them into a seperate app (Opera's RSS reader). It's not perfect, but it'll do.
Emerald Astrology
Not to mention some consistency in the stats, being able to stay logged in across more than two pages and perhaps performance improvements in feed fetching.
Honestly, I cannot see much point in using FB; the pain almost outweighs the benefits. The blogs that use FB for feed handling are all incredibly slow and unreliable to load in my feedreader. Perhaps Google will be able to throw a bit more hardware and bandwidth at solving that one for them, now.
They simply cannot keep login sessions consistent across pages; click on a link to see a different blog's stats, and WHOA I'm being asked to log in again. Sometimes it just thrashes between the one page I want to see, the login landing page and the login page. Those days its best to just give up and spend the time contemplating how to write the competition that they so sorely need.
Then there's the bogus, unreliable "stats" they give. One page says x visits; then next says x + deltaX (where deltaX definitely != 0).
With a little luck Google will just fold FB into analytics and Google Reader (or something) and then kill what remains outright.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
...that Google doesn't already have? I used Feedburner once a year or two ago (with my Blogger blog); as I remember, the really useful features they offered were conversion between Atom and RSS, and media enclosures for podcasts...
Last I heard, Blogger has that now. Or perhaps Feedburner got new features too?
Google could probably develop their own versions of all of their recent acquisitions but the real value comes from the hundreds of thousands or millions of users already using the other services. Google is creating the all seeing eye and the more user information, usage statistics and log files they can acquire the more accurate their vision becomes.
Thank you.
That said, IT does make an awful lot of noise. I mean, worse than that awful "Hip Hop" stuff. And the odd collection of beings that show up to challenge it, well! The neighborhood will never recover.
Just yesterday, an Orc stepped in my RosePlusPlus bush and....
668: Neighbour of the Beast