Apparently what actually happened is Reader was put together by a team that really cared about it, but always had to fight the corporation to keep it alive. They finally lost the political game to Google Plus, which stole a lot of their key people before it imploded:
The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.
Three greatest failures. Google+ started the trend of having Google product strategy set by executives who were accountable to the CEO/CFO rather than users/customers, vs. the previous bottom-up culture of engineers who passionately wanted to serve the user. That culture change is the root of the issues we're talking about in this thread.
No because if anything (the effect might have been small) it reduced the power of the open web and many websites (which Google tied togeather) and encouraged people to go to walled gardens ( Facebook, Instagram, twitter, etc ) which are controlled by other companies.
A lot of heavyweight bloggers and aggregators used Reader in their toolchains - it was very good at surfacing trending content. I don't think the effect on the blogging ecosystem was small.
I could believe they were clearing a path for G+ and Discover on Android.
What's frustrating is that Reader would have been complementary to Google+. It could have served as a huge funnel by which users could discover content to share on Google+. That's how I used to use Reader (though at the time I found content that I shared other places, such as Facebook, Digg, or Reddit).
The upkeep was apparently 12 engineers and they had tens of millions of users. It doesn't take that many users to justify 12 engineers plus infra, so it sounds like it was more that Google doesn't care to operate any product unless it will have users in the hundreds of millions.
By the end it had an upkeep of one dude's 20% time. It was very reliable and the Google infrastructure didn't require much ongoing maintenance at that time, the servers just kept on trucking.
Having basically all their users (well, as much as for any of their revenue generating products anyway) be revenue generating would require practically no effort for google specifically.
It fit their revenue model perfectly. It is trivial to put the exact same ads in there as they already had on search and gmail, and it is stickier than search or gmail.
LOL. the Googs worrying about being rude is charmingly funny in a webcomic kind of way. they removed their tag line of don't be evil. you think they are concerned about being rude?
however, this is precisely what Reddit was complaining about 3rd party apps doing to their content. everyone was trying to pivot to blaming AI scrappers, but that's just FUD.
https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...
The article above is actually very interesting, because the story it tells is that Google's two highest-profile failures are actually one failure. Facebook freaked them out so much that they scrambled to build something comparable with Google Plus. Google Plus stole most of the company's mind share but was executed so poorly that it never went anywhere. The company got major egg on their face from suffocating Reader to make Plus, then again when Plus died after having been pushed so hard.