GoogleBurner - A Bad Day for the Blogosphere?

I've been reading some of the comments about the rumoured acquisition of FeedBurner by Google. This has me worried. Google hasn't been hitting at 100% for the companies it has acquired. Remember the dull stuttering start that Urchin (now Google Analytics) got? Remember the DodgeBall mutiny? FeedBurner, while a big fish in the blogosphere is going to look like plankton in the Googleplex. Will it survive? Will my stats disappear?

The take on the deal is that it is a step for Google to get in to advertising in RSS feeds. To me, one of the greatest values of FeedBurner stats - the reason I'd like to have free access to their data - is in determining the level of attention that individual bloggers get. Feed subscriber stats may well be locked away for good inside Google, giving them a monopoly on this vital indicator of worth in the blogosphere. True, this data is not freely available just now (though some is via FeedBurner's API), however while it is still on the outside, it feels like it could be available. Once on the inside...?

As for ads in feeds. The standard textual Google ad is strongly associated with spam. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of Google ads on a blog and the quality of the blog. In addition, there is reasonable doubt as to the value to the publisher with contextual ads on blogs. Will things be different with feeds?

Comments

[Venlatakrishna Nalamothu]

Wonderful article with out of box thinking. I am happy to know that i can place ads now on feeds.

[BillyG]

I don't use Feedburner myself (maybe cause I'm too busy to blog anymore), but I've always hated the lag it takes for a feed to open when it uses the feedburner service. More often than not, I just move on to the next feed in my list.

While I'm certainly no fan of Google's borg mentality, I do see where it could speed up feed reads since they'd be part of G's cache.

Oh well, everything is converging anyway, it can't be stopped, that's the whole power of the system.