Around 7 days ago, Google aquired DoubleClick, the advertising gaint, in addition to the popular Google adsense. Quite literally dominated the online advertising industry. While that created quite a fuzz. The recent aquisition of feedburner was quite shock for many. Ofcourse many have reasons to prove their worries.
Of course, nothing new in the acquisition trend, Google takes this trend quite seriously ;).
I noted something funny though ;)
There are some very positive reasons that this is an ideal match and I am going to concentrate on those first:-
1. Existing Subscriber Statistics - Google mentioned that subscriber statistics are part of their calculations for relevance for Google Blog Search in recently released patent details. Whilst I have determined it is not currently a major ranking factor for blog search, Google are moving down a path of providing personal search results and are continually looking to improve Blog Search
2. Integrate FeedBurner With Blogger - Google look to provide useful services for their existing portfolio of products, and Blogger provides them with lots of advertising space. Many of Google’s competitors offer some kind of feed statistics (Wordpress.com), and Google need to do the same.
3. Integrate FeedBurner with Google Analytics - I have seen this discussed slightly, but no one hit the nail on the head. Currently it is impossible to track conversions into an RSS subscriber in the same way you can with email subscriptions. This is a major stumbling block for the future of RSS within marketing.
4. Intellectual Property - lots of the things that Feedburner do such as their advertising system, feedflares, redirects for RSS feeds, and maybe even aspects of their tracking technology could well have a patent pending, though whatever applications they may have made they are keeping the lid on.
5. 422,717 publishers - It is not a huge number, and is very easy to increase with an integration with Blogger. It is certainly many more than any current direct competitor. People are waving around that $100M is a good price based upon 10x earnings, and 10x the VC investment of around $10M in Feedburner. The most important statistic is that probably 99% of feed publishers currently don’t automatically qualify for Feedburner’s advertiser program. Certainly with 1000 subscribers the “monetize” tab is still closed for me.
6. Economy of Scale (Publishers) - it is hard to provide tracking for advertisers over 1000s of blogs, and also to handle the payment infrastructure for smaller publishers. That is probably one of the primary reasons FeedBurner up until now has only had monetization options for popular blogs, or “network feeds”.
7. Economy of Scale (Advertisers) - Google has a massive amount of advertising inventory, it is just a question of adding the ability to advertise on the blog content network, especially with their CPA offers which would be ideal for feeds
Adobe announced that it will be creating an online version of Photohop within the next 6 months. Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site.
Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.
Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday.Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.
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Spotback offers a rating, discovery and recommendation platform that can be easily used for any type of content. Spotback currently supports all major blog platforms and is highly configurable to meet the design needs of different sites. Spotback widgets are free, easy to install and guaranteed to improve your users’ online experience which result in more page loads.
Spotback Wordpress Plugin
The Spotback Wordpress plugin enables simple integration of rating component into your blog. By using this tool, all your users can rate your posts.
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The plugin requires no changes in your database or any special install procedures. It works with or without “Wordpress Widgets”.
Features
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installation process had been simplified.
I read in a recent post by vecosys , that Google is buying Feedburner in order to get into the rapidly evolving RSS Ad market. The delay in announcing the deal, I am told is solely due to the delay in closing out the DoubleClick deal.
If true this deal makes a lot of sense for both parties. Today many of us predominately read blogs via our RSS readers and thus never actually visit the original blog source and/or see the sites supporting adverts.
So RSS has effectively eliminated the potential value of AdSense and DoubleClick because the majority of people never view them. This is already hurting publishers who rely heavily on the income generated by people watching or clicking on adverts.
Therefore I think it would be a smart move by Google to acquire FeedBurner, simply because Google could then start to serve their own ads (Adsense or DoubleClick) into the RSS stream.
I remember when people first started talking about advertising appearing within RSS feeds and the enormous backlash but slowly over time I have begun to notice more and more RSS feeds appearing in my reader with supporting adverts.