Chicago-based Feedburner just got sold to Google for $100M, Tech Crunch is reporting. The rumor began last week, but TC now says it’s official, as the two companies are in a binding term sheet.
FB raised $10M from Portage (Series A), Mobius and Union Square Ventures in Series B (speaking of which, if this news is indeed 100% right, then Fred Wilson had two exits in one week - three days in fact - one from CBS and one from Google, not bad at all). Anyway, FB is reported to do $10M in revenues, so this one weighs in at 10x revenues. To put things into perspective, GOOG paid 10x revenues for DCLK and MSFT paid 15x revenues for AQNT.
These are relevant, since FB is an ad network too.
FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
FeedBurner also offers the largest feed and blog advertising network that brings together an unprecedented caliber of content aggregated from the world’s most recognized media companies (e.g. Wall Street Journal Online, Wired News, Ziff Davis), A-list bloggers and blog networks and individual publishers from around the world.
FB is a great company. We’ll be rolling out a range of FB products when WatchMojo.com relaunches on a new CMS / redesign in the next 1-2 weeks. But I don’t think this was an ad play, it was a publishing tool play. Apparently/of course, we’re not the first ones to point that out, something that Valleywag echoed earlier.
I’m also adding as an update, something a Tech Crunch commentor noted: at 422,717 publishers means Google is paying $237 per publisher, naturally some are bigger than others, but that is a good deal given that Google is master of monetization.
And via this deal: Google just added another dimension to how it organizes, monitors and basically controls the Web’s traffic. This is a plus for many, many, many sites that use FB, don’t get me wrong. Google runs FB links via GMail, for example.
Google has a horrible integration record with a lot of deals (dMarc, Dodgeball) and a few hits (YouTube, Analytics). That’s important, because FB is awfully akin to Analytics in that it’s a publisher tool. And since it already seems to index FB, integration should be a breeze.
I do see two issues though:
1. Feedburner is increasingly popping up as a search result high on Google. Google will now effectively be sending traffic, lots of it, to its own pages (indirectly). People cried foul when Google began to link as “shortcuts” links to Google Video, Maps, etc., which are actually a nice addition to search results. It killed those critics by launching Universal Search last week… mind you. But in this case, Feedburner will be in the organic results. I know, Google is already doing this with YouTube having so many top results for video-related queries, but Google being an impartial referrer of traffic is pretty much a thing of the past. Google is buying up a lot of these services that fetch top clicks. Someone should note that.
2. This will scare away many media companies from using FB.
The problem, of course, is that FB is a lot more than Analytics, and a lot of major media companies use it, it seems… and I just don’t see them using it once it’s in Google’s hands. Here are some of the blog networks that use it:
Will many of these defect? No. But judging by the leading brands, who are already being decimated by Google, will they really use something that will give Google way too much data on what is read, what is not, etc.?
What do you think? Does FB as part of Google scare away media companies to use it?
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May 23rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
[…] deal that makes sense to me, as it does to my friend Tony Hung from Deep Jive Interests and to Ash from Watchmojo. Feedburner is a great service with tons of useful features — many of which will no doubt […]
May 24th, 2007 at 3:40 am
[…] Hussey discusses FOG (Fear of Google), targeted ads, and analytics integration. Watch Mojo wonders whether this will scare aware major media brands currently using Feedburner and Heather […]