Google Makes FeedBurner MyBrand Free
Google is about making things accessible to everyone and one of the way to make this happen is to buy a service or software that used to cost money and release it for free. Google did this with Keyhole (now Google Earth), Picasa, SketchUp …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest turn in Google's post-acquisition freeware playbook, which had already turned Picasa, Keyhole (now Google Earth), and SketchUp into free products after each was bought. With MyBrand — FeedBurner's paid feature letting publishers serve feeds from their own domains — the same template now lands on feed management following Google's acquisition of FeedBurner.
The move matters because MyBrand was one of the few things FeedBurner charged for; making it free converts a revenue line into a distribution lever, consistent with the company's stated approach of buying paid software and opening access to everyone.
First-order effects
- Publishers who were paying FeedBurner for MyBrand get branded custom-domain feeds at no cost, immediately undercutting the product's own pricing.
Second-order effects
- Rival feed-management services lose their price umbrella on custom-domain branding, while FeedBurner broadens its installed base of publisher feeds — and the analytics attached to them — at zero marginal cost to the customer.
Third-order effects
- If the acquire-then-free pattern keeps holding across Picasa, SketchUp, Google Earth, and now FeedBurner, paid standalone software becomes structurally hard to sell wherever Google decides to compete, with monetization shifting to scale, data, and advertising rather than licenses.
The trend: Google is systematically converting acquired paid software into free products, treating giveaways as a distribution strategy funded by its core business.