Google Confirms FeedBurner Buy

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Ending weeks of speculation, Google announced today that it is acquiring RSS distribution company FeedBurner for an undisclosed sum.

The companies hailed the purchase as a combination of two businesses based on the distribution of information.

"The two companies share a vision of making information available to users whenever they want it. FeedBurner does this with RSS feeds and blogs, and is a complement to our mission of doing that with search," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president product management for Google.

"FeedBurner [offers] publishers services for distributed media; that's been our mantra since day one. The overlap between our focus on distributed media and analytics, direct promotion and monetization, with the depth that Google provides, is too perfect," said Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner. "We are both trying to provide the same kind of thing to the marketplace."

The acquisition will give Google access to FeedBurner's network of 431,171 current publishers to add to its AdSense network, and will provide a greater level of access to advertise on blogs and news feeds, Wojcicki said.

"FeedBurner has done a good job of acquiring a lot of quality feeds. Now you can have access to advertisers on feeds that otherwise you might not have been able to access," she said. "We have not been as active in providing a monetization solution for feeds. It gives us new blogs that are in our network as well as a new distribution method for delivery of ads and content."

Word of the acquisition began circulating last month, soon after Google announced its high profile acquisition of DoubleClick. That deal is currently being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

Financial details of the acquisition of the Chicago-based company were not disclosed. The companies also declined to discuss the status of FeedBurner's 30 employees or whether it would be relocated to Google's Silicon Valley offices.