[lolinder]

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.

[mike_hearn]

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.

[dylan604]

It doesn't take that many <revenue generating> users to justify 12 engineers plus infra,

Otherwise, those 12 engineers and infra are pure negative on the balance sheet

[LamaOfRuin]

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.

[pests]

That would seem a little rude wouldn't it?

Taking content from another site, maybe that has ads, and then displaying it in Reader next to your own ads instead?

I think it would have caused some issues in the RSS world that such a big player was using everyone's content for themselves.

I used Reader daily back then. It's strange to think my current method of manually checking sites for updates was solved so long ago.

[dylan604]

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.

[wombat-man]

Broadly, I think some business models are better suited for smaller companies than Google for sure.

Reader probably didn't have much B2B potential and was maybe profitable but yeah, they tend to swing for larger audiences.

[wombat-man]

I don't think they ever put ads on it, really wonder what the decision process on that was.

[mike_hearn]

Many blogs have ads on them. So you'd be stripping ads and replacing them with your own - not cool.

[wombat-man]

Well, sure, but they could just not show ads for blogs that didn't use google ads.

The ones that do... Well, why not show ads for them as originally intended?