A small but fast-growing Chicago Internet company attracted envious attention from its cyberspace peers Thursday as rumors swirled that it may be the target of a multimillion-dollar takeover by Google.
FeedBurner Inc. has carved itself a niche as the leader in the distribution of blogs, podcasts and other Internet-based content, making it a logical selection for Google, experts said. The company, rumored to be talking about a deal in the $100 million range, declined to comment.
Launched in 2004 by four founders who met at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, FeedBurner has made news this year with its expansion and its growing Web popularity. The company, which has grown to 30 employees after starting with five, plans to add 10 to 20 positions in the coming year.
Traffic to the FeedBurner Web site has grown by 200 percent in the past year, according to HitWise, an Internet market research firm. Besides helping distribute Web content, FeedBurner provides bloggers with statistics about how many people are accessing what they’ve created.
The service has grown in popularity as people are changing how they access content on the Internet, said LeeAnn Prescott, HitWise research director. It once was common for Web surfers to visit a blogger’s Web site to read the latest posting. Now it is more likely that a person will have several favorite blog postings sent to a central site — a task FeedBurner automatically does.
“I almost never visit bloggers’ sites anymore to read their postings,” Prescott said.
Although these automatic feeds aid the reader, it means that advertisements on the bloggers’ Web site go unseen and unmonetized, she said.
“What FeedBurner also does is find a way to run ads in the actual feed,” she said.
Google isn’t in competition with FeedBurner, but it is interested in all aspects of Web advertising, which makes FeedBurner a logical acquisition candidate, she said.
Jay Budzik, chief technology officer of MediaRiver, a Chicago-based Internet firm, said he had heard the rumors and believes that a Google acquisition makes sense.
“FeedBurner lets you figure out how big your audience is,” he said. “That technology is important to Google, and FeedBurner’s relationship to bloggers is also important.”
Gian Fulgoni, Chicago-based chairman of ComScore Networks, an Internet research service, said that with its recent acquisition of DoubleClick, Google has demonstrated it plans to take its business beyond its core search-engine operation and become a dominant force in online advertising.
“FeedBurner is pushing news feeds from sites to the end user,” Fulgoni said. “It is an ad network in a sense. Google has all these advertisers, so here is another place for them to put their ads.
“It makes sense, but if true, it’s a heckuva price.”
A posting Thursday on the Internet products blog TechCrunch said that a source confirmed a deal is in the works for $100 million in cash and will be concluded sometime in June.
———-
jvan@tribune.com
– – –
Web presence
200%
Amount FeedBurner traffic has grown in the past year, according to HitWise, an Internet market research firm.
– What the company does: Launched in 2004, it distributes blogs, podcasts and other Internet-based content. It also provides bloggers with statistics on how many people access what they’ve created.
