Marketing Pilgrim

It’s official, after much rumor, Google has indeed acquired FeedBurner…

As you know, we’re constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers. Likewise, we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve just acquired FeedBurner.

For those of you who aren’t bloggers, podcasters, or feed creators, Chicago-based FeedBurner is a leading provider of feed distribution and management tools. A web feed is a way for online publishers to syndicate their content and deliver it straight to readers. Each day, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content. Further, FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads.

We’re excited to continue offering the exceptional tools of FeedBurner to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. You can sign up for FeedBurner’s services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately.

Over at FeedBurner, they answering some questions about the acquisition, including:

Q. Will the feed-based ads continue to be sold on a purely (cost per thousand) CPM basis, or will they be sold on a (cost per click) CPC basis like most AdWords ads?

A. As this is a recent acquisition, it is too early to say what the ads pricing will look like. We will explore a variety of options to determine what is best for our users, advertisers, and publishers.

Q. How will the acquisition affect user privacy?

A. Google has a long-standing commitment to protecting the privacy of users’ personal information. FeedBurner users can expect the same high standards of privacy protection following this acquisition. We believe that notice and choice are the foundations of privacy. As such, we are committed to transparency for our end users, and to respecting the choices they make with regards to their privacy preferences. The transition to Google’s privacy policy and the opt-out mechanism we are providing for current FeedBurner users will help us achieve these goals.

Q. How will Google use the information gained from the FeedBurner acquisition?

A. Google’s privacy policy lets users know the types of information we receive and collect when you use our services, as well some of the steps we take to safeguard information.

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