June 1st, 2007
It’s Official: Google Has Acquired Feedburner And It’s All About Metrics And Advertising ROI
FeedBurner just quietly posted to their site the official announcement that Google has indeed acquired Feedburner. Here’s what CEO Dick Costolo has to say about why it’s such a great fit (which it really is):
1. Google’s competencies and focus around publisher analytics, distribution, and monetization map perfectly to our suite of services.
2. Publishers want a single dashboard and single source for the metrics that give them feedback about the value of their content and its impact on their business. By combining our market leading feed metrics with Google’s market leading site and marketing analytics, publishers now get a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience. This ‘total perspective’ has long been a goal of ours, and we think our combined analytics offering is going to provide publishers with previously undiscovered insights and opportunities.
3. The measurement of awareness advertising is evolving from unique impressions to audience engagement. By providing our hundreds of thousands of publishers with Google’s world-class advertising marketplace and metrics, we can provide far more value to publishers and begin to deliver this next step in ROI measurement to advertisers.
4. Speed of innovation. We have always prided ourselves in our ability to deliver extensive functionality to the market rapidly. As we have grown to hundreds of thousands of publishers with global demands, we are delighted to be combining forces with an organization that has a deep understanding of the most efficient ways in which to deploy significant functionality to the widest possible audience. It is one thing to roll out a capability to 3 percent of your customers and it’s something else entirely to roll out a broad set of new services simultaneously to customers around the globe.
Reasons #2 and #3 point to what a tremendous impact this acquisition could have on online publishing — the web is DESPERATELY in need of new metrics, and since feeds have become the building blocks of online publishing, well…it all makes perfect sense.
FeedBurner succeeded because they focused on metrics and hit the ball out of the park. Google is now positioned to close some of the huge metrics gap in online advertising ROI.
Congratulations, officially, to everyone at FeedBurner. You guys rock!
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It’s Official: Google Has Acquired Feedburner And It’s All About Metrics And Advertising ROI  - Jun 1, 2007  - Scott Karp
, after Sam Sethi at Vecosys broke the news. I know that this deal is only going to feed the “Google is too big and possibly evil†theorists, but I think that’s over-reacting just a tad. My friend Scott Karp has some thoughts at Publishing 2.0 Share This [IMG]
Scott,
Thanks for the catch. All I can say is “Wow!” and congratulate the Feedburner team on a big win and Google for a great get.
I wasn’t tracking it that closely but it makes perfect sense.
Here is to hoping the combination of publishing and web analytics takes this space to a whole other level.
James
, looks like Portage may have obtained close to 10X in 36 months. Now, remind me, who was it that said a dedicated RSS Venture Fund was loony? For more on Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, see: Danny Sullivan Scott Karp Alarm:clock Tags: feedburner, google, vc, venture+capital
It’s Official: Google Has Acquired Feedburner And It’s All About Metrics And Advertising ROI
ve just added the new Last.fm app to my Facebook profile, which creates a radio station from my ‘favourite music’ list - genius! Here is some comment from others on what these acquisitions mean: Publishing 2.0 | It’s Official: Google Has Acquired Feedburner And It’s All About Metrics And Advertising ROI TechCrunch | CBS Acquires Europe’s Last.fm for $280m
What’s also cool [for Google] about this acquisition is that there are a huge number of small web publishers like myself already using both Feedburner and Google Analytics.
Feedburner’s interesting because they have strong relationships with a variety of other web services like Typepad and Feedblitz. For example, Feedburner can be implemented from within the Typepad control panel and become the automatic override feed. Feedburner also offers multiple newsletter options including its own service.
Bottom line, Google picked up a really fine company that extends their reach in a variety of interesting ways.
However, it’s getting weird just how much of my web publishing now involves Google’s:
“single dashboard and single source”
I just hope I can get some credit down at the company store!
Scott,
First of all, an excellent piece on FB and Google.
I have figured it out. The VCs got $56MM for their $10MM in. Matt McCall made 15x on his first $1MM, he tells me and he made 10x overall, including the second round participation by DFJ, his parent firm. That suggests that they put in $1MM into the second round which was for $7MM and doing the math, the return on that round was 5x. And Fred Wilson of Union Square says that he got 3x on his money, which I calculated was probably $2MM (doing the math with $10MM total invested, subtracting out the $8MM already in). So, McCall and Portage and DFJ got a total of $20MM, the other second round guys like Sutter Hill and Mobius got $30MM on their $6MM in (I am taking out the $1MM that DFJ put in) and let’s say Fred Wilson and Union Square made $6MM. That leaves $44MM for the four founders Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe and the employees. I have written some about this and that can be found on my site, http://www.themayreport.com or at http://www.tmronline.com/A55951/tmrarticles.nsf/e17dd6a94826afb586256923007a8b6b/22e0ec732689c7f7852572f0006c458c!OpenDocument. But what I have written here at 8:49am on June 6th is more information than I have printed anywhere until now.