Rumors have been flying since last week that Google might acquire FeedBurner. The FeedBurner site is mainly a destination for bloggers seeking to measure their feed and blog stats, and US traffic has grown by 204% over the past year (April 2006 to April 2007). This reflects not only the growth of blogging in general, but also the increased need for analytics in the blogosphere.
Google has made some headway in the blogosphere in the past year – traffic to Google Reader has grown by 290% in the past four months (week ending 5/19/07 vs week ending 1/20/07), and Google Blog Search briefly overtook Technorati as the most visited blog search engine earlier this year. Google’s recent acquisitions have reflected its interest in broadening its advertising platforms (YouTube and DoubleClick). It makes sense that Google would want to expand its advertising reach into feeds, with so many blogs already running AdSense. In addition, the fast-growing Google Reader is currently not displaying ads, and Google must have an interest in monetizing it.