Google have acquired the popular XML feed distribution and advertising platform Feedburner for approximately USD$100 million. There has been rife speculation about the Feedburner deal on various web sites over the last month and the cat is finally out of the bag.

When you look at the online advertising landscape now, its incredible to think that in just a few years there has been such a massive swing in one direction. Back in the year 2000, there wasn’t really any one player that totally dominated online advertising – however companies like DoubleClick were really gaining strength and Google Adwords was growing as well. Fast forward half a dozen years and now you have:

• Adwords (Google)
• Adsense (Google)
• DoubleClick (Google)
• Feedburner (Google)
• TextLinkAds (Independent)
• YSM (Yahoo!)
• MSN (Microsoft)

Without the recent additions of DoubleClick and Feedburner, Google already controlled over 60% of the online paid advertising. Yahoo! and Microsoft must be having crisis talks every other month at the moment about the marketshare that they seem unable to recoup individually; no wonder Microsoft are in negotiations to purchase Yahoo! again.