Sr-ultimate.com | Web 2.0 & Me

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