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Google Leaps Yahoo, Grabs FeedBurner

As recently confirmed by the prolific Arrington, Google is slated to acquire FeedBurner in a US$ 100 million deal.

This is yet another wise move by big G, one that puts the company once again a step ahead of Yahoo, and in the fantastic position of being able to monetize the 700,000+ Web feeds currently managed by FeedBurner.

The company now claims the following stats:

1. Total number of feeds managed: 721,074
2. Total number of publishers signed-up: 422,717
3. Total number of podcast and videocast feeds: 111,383
4. Traffic growth of 385%, faster than MySpace and Digg (according to Nielsen/NetRatings)

They’ve been operating the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) for sometime. Its been notoriously un-profitable for bloggers, but sports a relatively high click through rate (CTR). We suspect that this combination of factors indicates that there’s a large opportunity for Google’s AdSense to quickly make up ground and convert a larger number of FeedBurner publishers.

FeedBurner was founded in 2003, launched in 2004 and raised just US$ 10 million over two rounds of financing. The project was funded by Mobius Venture Capital, Portage Venture Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Union Square Ventures.