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Lets file this one under rumors and speculation. It appears that Google may be courting RSS feed distributor Feedburner in an attempt to get a hold of the RSS Advertising market. Lets see how this could change the landscape of online Advertising.

Building A Better Feed

For those of you who are unaware, Feedburner is a service that allows you to take your vanilla RSS feed provided to you by your blogging software (or most everything else) and track it, customize it and later monetize it if you desire.

It’s really great at what it does, so great that we use it for our own feed (which you should subscribe to if you haven’t already).

The portion of this that matters to Google is the ability to place ads inside the content of your feeds, which is why this move does not seem as crazy as it might appear on the surface.

Add and Multiply

Google makes almost all of its revenue on its contextual advertisement. Yes, that’s right, everything else is secondary to its ability to court advertisers, get them to purchase ad space and deliver value to them so that they can be retained. This is just great, but when you are Google you eventually run into a big problem.

Saturation

It is very difficult to maintain a high rate of growth, when you are tied almost exclusively to the growth of static webpages on the internet. While these numbers are increasing rapidly, Google’s coverage is also increasing.

Adding Feedburner to the mix, would give Google a fresh field to play on. Since this is a new market, it would stimulate growth on levels much higher than they have been able to achieve by only dealing with web pages (and soon video?).

Knowing Google, it would be much easier for them to purchase a service that already has a huge installed base than to waste their time developing and marketing a feed management product on their own.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Here is why Google probably will make this deal.

A few more good points.

Personally, I think it’s going to happen if only for the sake of traffic driving headlines — something Google is apt to do every now and again.

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