Bollyball

Feedburner is a service that allows webmasters to burn their feeds so their visitors can subscribe to their feed service. Moreover, it provides feed stats, feed optimization, feed customization, and the most important facility of transforming that ugly XML feed page into a good looking HTML based feed page which users love to watch.

There had been rumors in the market that Google is looking to buy the RSS feed service provider Feedburner for $100 million. The reason what most of the experts are given is that Google wants to tighten its grip over classifieds market in which Google Adsense has always been the king. Feedburner has a wide network of blogs providing feeds and recently they have launched a new advertising service under the name Feedburner ads. Although Google has also experimented RSS ads sometime ago but closed it due to its less popularity which in my view was due to the fact that Google has less popularity in RSS fields.

But the fact is that RSS ads are somewhat less popular than the normal textual ads. Moreover the RSS feed sites that most of the internet users have been using these days does not support graphical ads which most of the advertising companies prefers. Thus, it could be seem that Feedburner ads might not be able to capture any graphical ads. So, the big question now is why Google wanted to buy Feedburner. The answer lies with Feedburner ads itself. Besides providing advertising service, Feedburner has a very large publisher networks and has been providing services such as email newsletters, feed publishing etc. This can really help Google to reach more independent web publishers and hence increasing Google's revenue. So, Feedburner is more valuable as a publishing network rather than advertising network to Google.

Posted by saurabh on Saturday, May 19, 2007 at 3:32 AM | Permalink