Someone asked me the other day about how Google’s purchase of Feedburner would affect their share of the “RSS market”. There is no RSS market, any more than there is an HTML or an XML market. Or a TXT market, for that matter.
RSS is a file format. FeedBurner’s principal competition is the RSS support that is built into publishers’ content management sytems, whether they’re using WordPress or some monster custom job. FeedBurner competes with these perfectly fine, free features by tracking who’s using the feed and (if you wish) adding advertising.
For these reasons, Feedburner should integrate well with Google’s existing publishing tools, analytics and advertising network business.
FeedBurner is a small piece of a very big trend. Syndication is already an important part of any content producer’s toolkit. But it’s just one element of the new wave of intermediation that’s about to sweep the business. I’ve just released my report on syndication, and in a few weeks will release an in-depth report on how to thrive in the coming era of intermediation in the media business.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.