Niall points to this FeedBurner announcement regarding the close of a $7M Series B financing.
It was led by Mobius VC, with participation from new investor Sutter Hill and Series A investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Portage Ventures. Mobius VC has already a strong commitment to Social Media through their investment in NewsGator and Technorati, in which DFJ is also involved.
Update: Brad Feld, who will seat on the board (I had not picked up on that, but am not surprisled), wrote a long and interesting post regarding his thoughts regarding the company and this investment. It sounds like he's had his eye on that one for a while, which is the best way to comfortably get into a deal - for both sides.
This is great news for the FeedBurner guys. Congratulations for bringing that caliber of investors in the company, which is today managing over 40,000 feeds.
As I wrote recently, FeedBurner has managed to insert themselves into the feed distribution foodchain thanks to a very useful piece of functionality, and this funding should reassure people who voiced concerns about handing over their feeds to a company without financial stability and clear terms of use. I am sure that the latter concern will be addressed.
The post also clarifies the business model - "AdSense for feeds" from what I can tell :
All of the free publisher services that we now offer will remain free, and we will continue to expand our suite of free publisher services. Further, we will only provide those services on a feed that a publisher has specifically selected. FeedBurner's core competency is managing complexity, and as a function of managing complexity, we provide detailed analytics and economic opportunities for publishers. [...]
FeedBurner will provide the opportunity for publishers to monetize their content in syndication, FeedBurner will provide a number of new and fee-based premium publisher services, and FeedBurner will provide bulk feed management services to small, medium, large, and humungous commercial publishers.
First, a word about monetizing feed content, aka "ads in feeds". We have been conducting trials for some months now and have a wealth of data and lessons learned on the topic. We have not yet rolled out these programs for publishers more broadly because there are still issues that remain to be addressed and questions for which we don't yet fully have the right answers. [...]
Next, a bit about premium services. The premium services we roll out will generally (but not always) be much more detailed versions of a free service. We are currently testing Total Stats Pro, a premium version of our free statistics service, and we hope to roll this out shortly once we've incorporated feedback from publishers testing the service. We will have much more to say about Total Stats Pro as soon as we roll it out, but as one might imagine, it provides another level of detail and insight into feed consumption over the free stats service. [...]
I saw that company picked-up by Six Apart, just because it seemed to make so much sense. Oh well, can't be right all the time.
PS: FeedBurner enables Buzznet users to splice their photo galleries with their main feed, in case you had missed the news.
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