MattMaroon.com

Techcrunch is reporting that Google is buying FeedBurner for $100 million. I think they’re getting a hell of a deal on that one. Put it this way, if God said to me “Matt, I’m going to let you own one of two website, FeedBurner or YouTube, which do you want?” I’d tell him to give me FeedBurner without hesitation. Then I’d ask him why he created The Scorpions. Rock You Like A Hurricane is why I’m an atheist. A just and loving deity would never allow that shit to happen.

RSS is exploding like Al Gore’s waistline, and nobody except maybe Google (whose Reader is phenomenal) is in a better position to take advantage of that. Burner’s usage has more than tripled in the last year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it again in the next.

As far as I see it, the blog is the internet’s killer app (sorry pornmongers, you had your day) and the RSS feed is to it what the mouse is to the computer. It’s not necessary, but you sure as hell wouldn’t want to go without it. On my poker blog the feed accounts for more than half of my traffic. I can’t imagine what it is for more tech-themed sites. On this blog it was the vast majority for a long time, though since getting a few high traffic links that’s changed a bit.

FeedBurner being bought by Google might suck for me. I was actually about to join their ad network. I honestly don’t care for AdSense, at least for my poker blog. It pays crap for us gambling-themed authors. I’m sure it’s alright for people who write about some other topics, but for what I’ve historically written about it’s a bigger disappointment than the Cleveland Browns. Amazon affiliate revenue has been much higher for me, which is especially surprising given the literacy rate you would expect amongst poker players. I’ll slap some AdSense on here at some point and see how it compares, but I don’t expect much to come from it.

What will be nice is if they integrate FeedBurner with Google Analytics. It does kinda suck having to look at the two separately. Being able to track them together would be really nice I guess, and in the end I’ve always preferred the ability to be lazy to making money anyway.

This entry was posted on May 24, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.