It's True-gle!
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. — FeedBurner has been acquired by Google.
Context & Ripple Effects
The deal closes out a two-week arc that began when word of the talks leaked on May 18, followed days later by TechCrunch reporting the transaction had been confirmed at roughly $100 million. With today's announcement on the FeedBurner blog — and pickups everywhere from Reuters to ZDNet to the Official Google Blog itself — what was conjecture about "our future as part of the Google family tree" is settled fact.
It matters because FeedBurner sits on the distribution layer for RSS feeds, the plumbing behind blogs and podcasts, and Google already has a stake in that layer via its feed API announced back in December 2005. Owning the largest feed-management service gives Google both the publisher relationships and the feed-level analytics that ad targeting needs.
First-order effects
- FeedBurner's publisher base — bloggers and podcasters who route their feeds through the service — now falls under Google's umbrella, making AdSense integration into feeds the obvious near-term product move.
- Google's acquisition spree continues at pace alongside its other June activity (Developer Day across ten countries, the Book Search Partner Program tool unveiled at BookExpo America), reinforcing its pattern of buying distribution points rather than building them.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms and ad networks competing for RSS monetization — Microsoft among them — are pushed to either acquire or build equivalent feed infrastructure, since FeedBurner's inventory and publisher lock-in now sit inside Google.
- Feed-level advertising gets a credibility boost: with Google validating the channel at a nine-figure price, publishers who treated feeds as a side channel have an incentive to treat them as measurable media inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the open web's middle-layer services — syndication, analytics, monetization — consolidate under a handful of large ad platforms, raising familiar dependence questions among independent publishers.
- RSS risks shifting from a decentralized protocol ecosystem to one where a single company controls the dominant feed-management choke point, a structural concern Mashable-style commentary about what Google owns is already voicing.
The trend: Mid-2000s web infrastructure is consolidating around Google, which is acquiring the distribution and measurement layers of the open feed ecosystem rather than competing against them.