Google's FeedBurner Acquisition Is All About Metrics, Advertising ROI

FeedBurner just quietly posted to their site the official announcement that Google (GOOG) 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!

Comments

[Brian Croner]

I'm all about slamming Google's acquisition abilities, but this time I have to be honest and say they made a rather strong purchase. In comparison to YouTube, or even not, this was a good purchase. I researched some RSS and atom stuff in detail last night, and I have nothing bad to say about the concept of their acquisition. I also am slightly familiar with feedburner, though not much, and would say they made a good buy. I also think it was under-priced for what they got. There are some significant advantages to this.