Google strengthens its advertising section with "FeedBurner"

Online advertising and internet search giant, Google announced Friday that it has acquired FeedBurner, a Chicago-based privately-held company that provides media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. The move comes as part of Internet powerhouse’s immense efforts to expand itself in the advertising section and capture a bigger share of online advertising.

By acquiring FeedBurner Inc., a service focused on making money from the steady stream of information flowing from blogs, podcasts and traditional news sites, Google is apparently adding another potentially lucrative channel to its network of online advertising, an industry it already dominates over rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corporation.

Although, the amount that Google spent on acquiring the three-year-old news feed management provider is not yet disclosed but previous reports about Google's plans to buy FeedBurner placed the sales price at around $100 million.

On an official blog, Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice president of product management wrote that FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of global users and provides “unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content.”

Once the deal closes, Google plans to sell advertising alongside the content FeedBurner delivers to its network of more than 400,000 Web sites, said Wojcicki. "One of the advantages of FeedBurner joining Google is that our advertisers will get more access to those publishers," he said.

Google’s latest acquisition comes after its planned acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. but, the three notable privacy groups have been trying hard to halt the merger of DoubleClick with Google on privacy grounds, contending the deal is a threat to privacy rights.

Concerned with Google's proposed $3.1 billion agreement to acquire fellow online advertising firm DoubleClick, the Electronic Privacy Information Center along with the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and US Public Interest Research Groups (US PIRG) had filed the complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, alleging that Google and DoubleClick aggregate exhaustive personal data from users browsing the Internet but don't adequately protect the privacy of that information.

The merger with New York-based DoubleClick, which serves up billions of graphical display ads every day from corporate marketers on thousands of sites across the Web, will extend Google's dominance of the online ad market. If approved, the deal would close as planned later in 2007, after which Google, the leader in an alternative form of online marketing that places ads alongside Web search results, would emerge as an even more powerful force in the online ad market.

Funded by Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Union Square Ventures FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. As of 29 May 07, FeedBurner hosted feeds for 431,171 publishers, and delivered 736,494 feeds.

FeedBurner’s headquarters will remain in its current location i.e. Chicago after the acquisition, Google said. Google shares jumped to $2.49 to close at $500.40 Friday.