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: # Total number of feeds managed: 721,074 # Total number of publishers signed-up: 422,717 # Total number of podcast and videocast feeds: 111,383 # 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.