Google Confirms Acquisition Of FeedBurner

The Google Blog has confirmed the rumors upon rumors that they have acquired FeedBurner.

Google said they have acquired them to give “AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.” You can find FeedBurner’s CEO, Dick Costolo’s thoughts on the acquisition here.

Postscript: I just got off a conference call with Susan Wojcicki, VP Product Management of Google, and Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner. Here are some of my notes:

– FeedBurner will stay in Chicago, but will spend a lot of time in Google offices around the world.
– 30 employees are currently at FeedBurner, but no word if FeedBurner will let any employees go (seems like they will just be adding resources).
– FeedBurner has 431,171 publishers as of Wednesday but won’t disclose revenue or income numbers.
– Not discussing financial terms of the acquisition and probably won’t be in any SEC filings.
– Venture capital raised to date is $10M over 2.5 rounds of funding.
– I asked if FeedBurner Change their name like Urchin changed their name to Google Analytics? Not sure.
– I asked if Google plans on integrating Google Analytics with FeedBurner stats? Not sure but Dick added they are very excited about giving the publisher a 360 view of their readers, which includes RSS activity and web site activity.
– I asked, the main advantage of FeedBurner over Google AdSense for RSS for a publisher was that FeedBurner paid a lot more. How will this impact that? Google can learn from FeedBurner on this but Google and FeedBurner said it will vary from publisher to publisher.
– I asked, will FeedBurner drop the fees for their “Pro Stats” product? Dick said they are still deciding that.