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

VCs have changed?

[hirschma]

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?

Re:VCs have changed?

[Richard McBeef]

Back in the Web "1.0" days, VCs would never have settled for a payout that small...This is "only" 10x

No shit. This is way worse than the 0X that most VC companies reaped back in the days of web 1.0.

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:VCs have changed?

[Richard McBeef]

Did they do a good job picking up your garbage?

Not only that, but they did it for free. And if anyone beat their price, the next pickup was 50% off plus they'd mow your lawn and wash your dog all while delivering 50 cents worth of groceries (20% off) on a motorbike from a store 15 miles away.

So what if they are locked in?

[Timesprout]

They are getting $100 mil and they probably dont leave their parents basements all that much anyway.

Why bother?

[garcia]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[drinkypoo]

I think they're just stamping out competition. And they don't have to keep doing it forever, either. They buy one or two more of 'em and people will stop starting them. When Google has the top three of whatever, people will mostly stop making whatever. The procedure worked for Microsoft time and time again, why not Google? :)

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.

"Locked in for a couple of years?"

[PHAEDRU5]

This can't end well.

I've been in this room for eight years now, Clarice. I know they will never, ever let me out while I'm alive. What I want is a view. I want a window where I can see a tree, or even water. I want to be in a federal institution, far away from Dr. Chilton.

what exactly does feedburner do?

[andres32a]

Excuse me if this question is dumb but what exactly does feedburner do? I just don't get it.

All style, little substance

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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.

Google buying traffic again. But why?

[Animats]

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.

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.

Traffic = Data?

[MenTaLguY]

It's the only thing I can think of.

What is a feedburner?

[Tibor the Hun]

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)

All your accounts are belong to us

[Kris_J]

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.