Sam Sethi, a former TechCrunch U.K. editor heard from a very trusted source that Google will be buying Feedburner to get into the RSS ad market. Because a lot of people just read summaries of blog posts and news stories on RSS-powered homepages such as Netvibes and PageFlakes, potential customers may not see the advertisements embedded within websites since it doesn’t show up.
Since Feedburner has a program that allows publishers to embed advertisements within RSS feeds and collect a commission from clicks, Google has taken an interest in the company.
The deal has not yet been officially announced by Google but has been confirmed by TechCrunch. The amount is worth $100 million and will be in cash. And the founders will work for Google for a couple of years and the transaction should be completed within 2-3 weeks.
Feedburner had 2 rounds of funding: $1 million Series A by Portage Ventures and $9 million Series B funding from Mobius Venture Capital and Union Square Ventures[5].
Many blogs and publishing companies route their own XML RSS feeds to be powered by Feedburner. This way companies can collect statistics on which RSS feeds for stories and/or blog posts are the most popular among readers.
Congratulations to Feedburner founders: Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Matt Shobe, Steve Olechowski.
