Chicago-based FeedBurner, which is privately held and venture-backed, provides a range of software and services used by over 200,000 commercial content publishers, bloggers, and podcasters to provide insights into how their content is being distributed and consumed online. The company claims to manage over 350,000 RSS feeds and also maintains a large advertising network.
Blogbeat’s online service provides insight about what’s happening on a blog, including who’s reading, what posts are being read, which content is most popular.
Integration with FeedBurner’s services will provide insights into the relationships between RSS feed subscribers and blog site visitors.
Blogbeat functionality will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s free StandardStats service. The integration is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of this year.
The acquisition reflects a growing trend among corporations to use blogs for business and marketing purposes.
FeedBurner said it will continue to support existing Blogbeat customers. The company will offer full refunds to Blogbeat customers moving to FeedBurner’s free StandardStats service. Meanwhile, Blogbeat, which is based in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, said it will not be signing up any new customers following the acquisition.
FeedBurner is planning to launch new and optional fee-based enhancements in 2007 as a result of the acquisition.
Blogbeat’s founder Jeff Turner will join FeedBurner as the lead engineer of its web analytics division.
