FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs
Hot on the heels of last week's much-ballyhooed free FeedBurner for everyone, we are very excited to announce the immediate availability of one-click redirection for Blogger Blogspot blogs (note our fine use of both alliteration and first syllable congruence).
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second shoe dropping on Google's June 2007 acquisition of FeedBurner — the deal the company itself teased in It's True-gle!. Nine days ago FeedBurner made its previously paid TotalStats and MyBrand services free for every publisher (FreeBurner for Everyone), and today comes the first concrete product integration: one-click feed redirection built directly into Blogger's Blogspot blogs.
The sequence matters because redirection is the lock-in mechanism. FeedFlare showed back in December 2005 that FeedBurner wanted to attach services to content as it travels through feeds; owning the redirect means owning where a publisher's audience is counted, and Blogger hands that position to FeedBurner by default rather than by persuasion.
First-order effects
- Millions of Blogspot publishers can point their blog's feed at FeedBurner in one click, consolidating subscriber measurement onto FeedBurner's stats instead of Blogger's native feed.
- FeedBurner gains a distribution channel no rival feed service can match: the default path inside Google's own blogging platform, immediately after its paid tier went free.
Second-order effects
- Competing feed-management services lose the easiest on-ramp for the largest hosted-blogging base, forcing them to compete on features rather than on switching friction.
- With audited subscriber counts concentrated on FeedBurner, feed-based advertising inventory becomes measurable at scale — the precondition for monetizing feeds through an ad network.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, acquisition targets stop being standalone products and become infrastructure folded into the acquirer's platforms — the feed layer of the blogosphere consolidating around whoever owns the redirect.
- Publishers' relationship with their own audience metrics shifts from self-hosted to platform-audited, a dependency structure regulators and competitors would eventually have to reckon with if feed syndication stays central to web publishing.
The trend: RSS feed management is consolidating from independent services into platform-default infrastructure, with Google's acquisition-and-integrate playbook setting the pace.