The latest acquisition rumour doing the rounds is that Google are looking to buy Feedburner for $100m. Of all the rumours I have read recently, this one would make a lot of sense as acquiring Feedburner would allow Google to improve Google Analytics and Google Reader, and hopefully improve its ability in the future to monetise feeds.
At the moment feed monetisation seems to be dominated by the insertion of non-contextual text links and banners, which are never going to be extremely profitable. If Google do buy Feedburner it will hopefully introduce a whole new range of advertising opportunities.
I hope this acquisition does happen, as at the moment I’m struggling to see the advantages as a publisher of having a feed, other than to keep my readers happy by providing them an easy way to keep in touch with my site.  As a publisher of a full content feed what I have seen personally is that the majority of my feed readers don’t actually visit my site to join in discussions.
Hopefully, as well as increasing the monetisation opportunities within feeds, Google will also speed up the addition of interactive features to feeds.
