Shopping continues: Feedburner in google shopping cart

Google has officially announced the purchase of Feedburner - a service that provides services for managing RSS feeds, collecting statistics and advertising in them. The price of the transaction has not been announced, although it is rumored that it is approximately $ 100 million.

The main objectives of the acquisition are set out in the Google corporate blog - to provide web publishers with more opportunities in the field of information dissemination, and advertisers - a greater number of advertising sites. The Feedburner development team joined the ranks of Google, and work began on integrating the service with the rest of the new owner.

It can be assumed that Feedburner practices will be used in Google Adwords (advertising on RSS), Google Analytics, Google Reader and Blogger (stream optimization, RSS statistics and, possibly, even blogs in general ). Using the technology Feedburner can be improved and search blogs, especially given the factors affecting the relevance of it .
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Together with technology, Google has also “acquired” major customers: the Feedburner platform is used by Reuters, Newsweek (included, by the way, in MSNBC), The Wall Street Journal, and others, not to mention a considerable number of blogs, including Techcrunch's most popular peddler of authentic rumors. At the moment, Feedburner can advertise in more than 430 thousand RSS feeds.

It should be noted that at the moment Feedburner has no competitors in the field of managing RSS and advertising in it (the latter closed in January of this year ). This can be connected with the complexity of creating technologies for collecting statistics. However, the most important question remains about advertising. Its location is the main source of income for the company, but:

1. in the case of Feedburner, the concept of “targeted advertising” is limited to targeting a group of blogs or any region;
2. even Feedburner itself in its appeal to potential advertisers recognizes that advertising will be placed in an area where it is almost nonexistent. Not the largest number of users is ready to see ads in RSS.

Both the first and the second problem can be partly solved by Google’s contextual advertising practices. However, expect a "massive attack" of advertising in the usually free RSS in the near future is not worth it, especially in Russia. The prospects for the Russian blogosphere and the Blogus company representing Feedburner in Russia are rather vague in this case: few “stand-alone bloggers” admit this, and this can also be seen from general trends. In RuNet, blogs hosted on collective sites like LiveJournal, LiveInternet, etc., prevail; the owners of these sites independently “monetize” their work with the help of the simplest method - placing banners, advertising in RSS is uninteresting for them due to the meager number of “external readers”.

In general, the new acquisition seems to be one of the most logical and consistent - at least because it fits into the overall concept of the development of the new owner. The minuses (if you can call them that) are compensated by the fact that Google is one of the world leaders in the field of technology - and will certainly make every effort to cook your omelette . No wonder today the company's shares for the first time since the beginning of the year returned to around $ 500.