$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed
Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal.
Context & Ripple Effects
The confirmation closes out a fast-moving week: ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi first reported the talks on May 18 in a rumor of Google buying Feedburner, and TechCrunch now says a source close to the deal puts it at $100 million. The logic was already visible in Google's own infrastructure work — its feed API announcement in December 2005 showed the company building around RSS as a distribution layer before deciding to buy the largest management platform on top of it.
The story traveled quickly beyond TechCrunch: Digital Inspiration ran a plea for Google to leave BlogAds, Adify and TribalFusion alone, while Geek News Central framed the purchase outright as 'pure Evil' — early evidence that the reaction is less about Feedburner's price than about Google absorbing yet another independent piece of the publishing-advertising stack.
First-order effects
- Feedburner's founders and investors get a reported $100 million exit, and the RSS management service its publisher customers rely on for feed stats and ad insertion now sits inside Google.
- Google gains direct ownership of feed-level advertising inventory and audience measurement across a large base of blogs and podcasts, complementing the feed plumbing it built with its own API.
Second-order effects
- Independent feed-ad and blog-ad networks named in the coverage — BlogAds, Adify, TribalFusion — now compete against Google in a category where Google controls both the dominant ad marketplace and, through this deal, a major distribution channel.
- Publishers who use Feedburner face a choice between staying on an increasingly Google-owned stack or migrating to smaller rivals, shifting negotiating leverage toward whoever owns the measurement and monetization layer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, online advertising intermediation keeps consolidating around a single buyer: each acquired niche network (feeds today, other formats next) narrows the set of independent alternatives publishers can sell through.
- RSS itself risks being repositioned from an open distribution protocol into infrastructure curated by one large platform, raising the structural question regulators and publishers eventually have to answer about who controls content pipes.
The trend: Google is assembling the advertising-and-distribution stack piece by piece through acquisition, converting independent middleware like feed management into owned infrastructure.