Google has once again quenched its increasing thirst for acquisition by snapping up web feed distribution and management specialist FeedBurner, which handles more than 736,000 feeds and deals with over 430,000 publishers.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Some media reports are bandying around a suggested price tag of $100 million, although this figure has not been officially confirmed by Google.
"As you know, we're constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers. Likewise, we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we're very pleased to tell you that we've just acquired FeedBurner," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google in a post on the company's blog.
"We're excited to continue offering the exceptional tools of FeedBurner to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. You can sign up for FeedBurner's services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately."
FeedBurner says that it was receptive to being acquired because it believes that there is a great deal of alignment between what Google has achieved and the company's own vision, as well as suggesting that the combined power of its feed metrics and the search giant's analytics provide publishers with a single dashboard view of their audience.
Other areas that made the purchase a compelling one for the company included Google's proven expertise in publisher analytics, distribution and monetisation, in addition to its innovation and global reach.
"Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true," the company said in an official blog post.
"FeedBurner has been acquired by Google. The local weather forecast calls for general euphoria with intermittent periods of off-the-rails delight... We like our chances. We are confident that we are going to be a part of the company that can best deliver the most comprehensive suite of services to publishers. We are confident that we're going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you'll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself "Well, *that* was a good idea!"
FeedBurner has created a set of FAQs on its website for customers eager to find out how this acquisition affects them.
The acquisition is a great example of Google's attempts to keep well ahead of the competition in terms of its core advertising business, according to David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum.
"One thing that is clear from this is that Google will continue to aggressively enhance its advertising business. Introducing advertising into syndicated content (in other words, content that users 'pull' to themselves) is another small push to extend the 'normal' areas of advertising," he said.
