If you’ve been following the news, you’ve probably already heard about Google’s purchase of FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers many services to RSS publishers, including advertising within feeds, which many have speculated as the impetus for the Google’s interest. Clearly that’s a factor, but I wonder of there is another motivator, also.
As interesting as FeedBurner’s advertising service might be to Google, their stats might be their most important asset. FeedBurner is the leading feed aggregator, so publishers can redirect their subscribers through FeedBurner to estimate the number of subscribers to their feed. Why would Google care about knowing how many subscribers each feed has?
- To upgrade Google Analytics. A key conversion for many Web site owners is a subscription to an RSS feed. Now, Google Analytics could tap FeedBurner to recognize that conversion event.
- To upgrade its relevance ranking. With Google now integrating blogs and other new media into its new universal search results, Google could use FeedBurner subscription numbers as part of its relevance ranking—blogs with more subscribers might tend to rank higher, just as Web sites with more links do.
- To combat spam. Splogs (spam blogs) pose a thorny problem for search engines. Sometimes they can be identified because of poor content, but suppose Google knows a blog’s subscriber count? You’d expect splogs to have almost no subscribers—one more data point for Google to chew on to ban splogs or downgrade splog rankings.
Time will tell exactly what Google is looking for in its acquisition, but it’s clear that several reasons exist—as a FeedBurner publisher, I am very interested in seeing how Google integrates FeedBurner’s capabilities.
