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."

Comments

Eat my dirt, techcrunch!

[mfaras]

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.

--
Eat my dirt.

Re:VCs have changed?

[foniksonik]

Definitely changed... looking for 3x plus on mid-terms.

I was at a startup for 4 years that just sold last year for 165M... w/ 60M in VC money. The early investors got 3X the late got 1.5X but at a better pricepoint (they could buy more). First round was 15M, second was 30M, 3rd was 15M. I made 8.5K via options exercised as a lowly employee on a 1.5k pricepoint (0.15 per share, 9650 shares approx) but VCs got 3x that on average with several million shares each at different prices.

Re:Beats the fuck outta me

[Richard McBeef]

Not that I don't not disagree with about what worthless pieces of shit that Slashdot editors aren't, but linking to Wikipedia is the epitome of laziness. It is so full of unfactual misinformation that it can't be not trusted in it's integrity or, as one would say, lack thereof.

Re:what exactly does feedburner do?

[Kalriath]

Excuse me if this question is dumb but what exactly does feedburner do? I just don't get it. Do you get the Slashdot RSS feed? Feedburner does that. (In fact, the Slashdot RSS feed IS a Feedburner feed). I think it adds advertising to the RSS... or something. Never seen it though.

RSS for quick summaries and checking updates

[Quevar]

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... You seem to be missing the idea of RSS feeds. You shouldn't be grabbing the RSS feed, your application should be and displaying the information to you so you don't have to go to their site to see what has changed. I have about 20 different sites that I pay attention to. It takes a noticeable amount of time to go to all twenty sites. So, I subscribe to their RSS feeds and when they change the content, I will see that I haven't looked at an article. Without even going to their site, I can can look at the headline and a brief summary to see if I want to read more. Many times, just a headline and a summary is all I want. I can glance through the summary in a small fraction of the time it takes to open up all the sites.

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.

Google's brand alone does it

[cyberianpan]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[SatanicPuppy]

Meh. If microsoft hadn't won, then decided that, since they'd won, all further development was a waste of time, there would have been no niche for new operators. We'd all be on IE11 by now, because they'd have agressively ported it to all operating systems in a bid to globally corner the hugely important browser market, and then they'd have built online application inventories through their massively dominant search portal that were tied directly to the pc through activeX.

Instead, they acted like fools, and blew their lead. So don't assume that because the last player who tried to be dominant mistook the game for the special olympics and got beat down, that the next competitor won't learn from their mistakes.