FeedBurner is a web feed management service that provides custom RSS feeds and management tools for bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers. It was founded in 2004[1] and acquired by Google in 2007.
Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis[2] and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format,[3] authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds.[4] Users can find out how many people have subscribed to their feeds and with what service/program they subscribed.
Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds.[5] FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of October 5, 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast and videocast feeds.[6]
FeedBurner was founded in 2004 by Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. The four founders were consultants together at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).[1]
On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google for a rumored price of $100 million.[7] One month later, two of their popular "Pro" services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users.[8]
On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the FeedBurner APIs were deprecated.[9] Google shut down the APIs on October 20, 2012.[10]
Google terminated AdSense for Feeds on October 2, 2012 and shut it down on December 3, 2012.[11]