Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has purchased RSS feed leader FeedBurner. Terms were not disclosed, but the cost was rumored to be about $100 million. The company provides feeds for about 400,000 customers, many of them blogs. It will be a good fit with Google's Blogger platform, which is widely used.
More menacing for Google's competition is the fact that Google will control the largest banner ad serving company, DoubleClick, the premier search text ad business, AdSense, and, with FeedBurner, the largest RSS advertising platform. Firms, including AOL and The Wall Street Journal, participate in the FeedBurner advertising network. Advertising is sold by channels like "business" and "news' with feeds from the appropriate sites banded together.
Once again, it is surprising that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) were not buyers. The price of the company was not so high as to be out of reach.
Google's M&A seems to be as good as its search tools.
Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.
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