Tag: feedburner

Google Acquires FeedBurner

Post ImageLots of talk today about Google’s $100 million acquisition of RSS management company FeedBurner. Congrats to the FeedBurner guys! I do have to admit though that I am bit sad that FeedBurner is now a Google property. I guess they were too valuable to remain independent forever though. From TechCrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Must be pretty sweet to get an all cash deal. TechCrunch confirmed it today, but it looks like Valleywag had the story right last week.

Not everyone is happy about the deal. Todd Cochrane does a good job of spreading FUD in his post. Todd, you need to worry less!

Read: TechCrunch

Podcasting Growth by Subscribers

Post ImageBlogging is a pretty open, flexible medium and each blog varies greatly from the next, but if there’s one thing that holds true (usually) it’s that some of the best insights are found in the comments. I was reminded of this today when reading Frank Barnako’s post about the latest podcasting stats from FeedBurner:

Rick Klau, vice president, business development, said that at the beginning of the year Feedburner had 1 million subscriptions to podcasts it helped deliver. That number has now grown to 5 million subscribers for 71,000 podcasts. For you math fans, that means the average podcast has … ta da!!! … 70 subscribers.

That stat is interesting all by itself, but when Rick Klau himself dropped by and left a comment, it became really interesting. Here’s what Rick had to say:

I hadn’t realized it (I never do the average thing – must be my life-long aversion to math), but now that you point it out: this average number has doubled in just the last six months.

Indeed it’s right in the headline for the previous article that Rick linked to, in April of this year FeedBurner said the average podcast had 35 subscribers.

I think this is an important statistic to keep track of. Usually when trying to measure the growth of podcasting, you might look to the number of podcasts or the number of episodes created in a given period of time. But just as important is the number of people listening to or watching those podcasts and episodes.

That said, the rate of new podcasts appears to be increasing as well. In the April article, FeedBurner was adding an average of 2278 new podcasts each month (based on the numbers provided). That number has since risen to 4000. Not bad at all!

Read: Frank Barnako