Google buys Feedburner

The unconfirmed has become the semi-confirmed. On Monday, I listed Feedburner as one of the companies that Google was after, and TechCrunch is now reporting that the deal is done. The damage? (Little finger to edge of mouth) $100 million. And the funding up to now? $10 million. This is going to throw more fuel on the VC-funding fire. And I was a little concerned today to learn that a start-up I hadn't heard of had gone through a successful IPO. Oh no, here we go again...

I started using Feedburner a little while ago, by the way, so I could track how many vistors were reading my postings via RSS. After all, for all I know it could be millions and millions! If you subscribed over a month ago, and you like the idea of my fragile ego expanding as I learn how many readers I have, just delete my feed from your reader and re-subscribe using this link. Oh go on, you know you want to.

So I'm actually quite pleased about the Feedburner acquisition. I currently use Google Analytics to track vistors to my web pages, but most of the people I know who read this do so via RSS - which can only be tracked by Feedburner or something similar. So I can now look forward to all my traffic being amalgamated and handled centrally. Nice!

But it all begs the question; how are Google going to get back their $100 million? There are no ads on my Google Analytics page. Would they start adding adverts to RSS postings going through Feedburner? Maybe some kind of revenue-sharing scheme a'la AdSense is in the offing? Interesting....