Feedburner, a two-year-old Web analytics start-up out of Chicago, today acquired an even smaller Web analytics firm called Blogbeat.
Feedburner provides online publisher analytics about who subscribes to Web syndication feeds. Before the acquisition, Blogbeat was an online service that provided bloggers insight about what visitors read on their sites.
Feedburner COO and co-founder Steve Olechowsk told internetnews.com that the company had long been looking to provide its publishers the analytics Blogbeat offered.
“It was a classic build versus buy and because [Blogbeat] also used the feed to derive a lot the information, it was a very easy decision for us to just look at buying Blogbeat and integrating it rather than building a solution ourselves,” Olechowsk said.
The Blogbeat acquisition also brings two smaller players some heft in an increasingly crowded yet nascent syndication industry.
Already, syndication and RSS-focused firms such as NewsGator, Attensa, and KnowNow are trying to package their feed technology for enterprise customers to expand their base beyond bloggers.
Last week, The New York Times started beta testing its own feed aggregator called My Times.
And, according to Ask.com, subscribers to its free RSS aggregator Bloglines jumped by 300 percent between June 2005 and June 2006
Feedburner Vice President Rick Klau recently said he thinks the growth has barely begun.
“You’re going to see the audience for feeds go from tens of millions of people today to hundreds of millions of people almost overnight.”