As seen on Techmeme, Google has made some of Feedburner’s premium services free to everyone, specifically TotalStats and MyBrand. This is in line with previous acquisitions, where paid services were made free following the acquisition. As someone who paid for TotalStats till today, I am delighted to see this move. As Joe Duck points out Google’s goal is to keep the core services that it offers free of cost, while continuing to monetize traffic via their advertising platform(s). Much as I admire Google’s capability to monetize internet traffic, one does wonder where this model breaks down. I suspect there are people inside the Googleplex (or perhaps down the road in Kirkland) who spend a lot of time thinking about alternate routes to monetization that can either supplement ad revenues or work in those cases where the ad model breaks down.

In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the Google largesse and upgrade all my Feedburner accounts to pro versions.