14 DAY TRIAL // There are rumors about a possible FeedBurner acquisition by the Mountain View company Google, currently the owner of the best search engine on the Internet. It seems that the investment is approximately $100 million, but there is no official statement from the two companies involved in the speculation. According to Vecosys, the website that launched the rumor, Google has a single goal: expand its AdSense advertising platform. Basically, the search giant plans to distribute adverts through the RSS feeds because most of the Internet users are currently registered for feed, avoiding to visit the blog or the website, resulting in a loss of traffic for Google's ads.
Using the new acquisition, Google plans to insert adverts straight into the feed and obtain a boost of traffic without having to redirect the readers on the main blog. However, the Mountain View company might be interested in implementing the feed analytics solution into its own product and provide more relevant information for the webmasters.
Some might say that Google tries to follow a simple rule: if you want to avoid problems from the competitor, you should try to buy them and implement their solutions into your own products. However, I don't believe that Google wants to buy FeedBurner for only one reason, namely to avoid problems coming from the competition. Now, Google is the owner of Reader, the online RSS reader that allows users to read latest headlines straight from a web-based interface.
Recently, Google also acquired DoubleClick, an advertising company that might help the search giant expand the advertising solutions. There were also numerous rumors sustaining that Google will implement AdSense into several games, aiming to attract a different segment of users. FeedBurner will be probably placed on the list with the companies able to expand the advertising platforms and to boost the profits as soon as the deal is confirmed.