Google buys Feedburner

Rumoured to have paid $100 million

1 June 2007 21:56 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google has confirmed that it has bought RSS feed tools and tracker company Feedburner for an undisclosed fee.

Rumoured by some blogs to have been sold for $100, Google has cited the reason for the acquisition as a way of getting "AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users".

Feedburner Countered the appeal of being bought by one of the biggest internet companies in a post on its site blog by saying that it will now use "Google's analytics, distribution, and monetization map to propel its offerings further."

Google has said that it will work to improve the experience of its users, publishers, and advertisers, but it's too early to know how FeedBurner's technology will be integrated into its software offering, although industry experts talking to Pocket-lint suggested that it could be rolled into Google's adsense or Analytics offering.

Set up in 2005, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their RSS content.

The site counts more than 430,000 Web site publishers as users of RSS, and a total of 736,000 RSS feeds, including roughly 110,000 audio or video feeds.