[joelberman]

You may be correct but I like to follow the money. Since it is not a product that is sold, the value must have been in Google learning what we like to read. Google did not learn anything new about our interests from Reader and therefore it had no value.

[VLM]

Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader (and while I'm on a roll, I'm also extremely handsome LOL) That being said, aside from being an unusual subset of the population which they may or may not have advertising clients for, that sub-population also might be non-monetizable people, adblockers. If I'm an unusual person they can't find advertisers for, and I adblock, GOOG can learn all they want about me, they'll never make a penny.

Sometimes my mythtv commercial auto-skipper will miss or whatever and I'll be stuck watching TV commercials, and I'm occasionally all WTF I'm not part of this culture anymore. I mean I still live here, but advertising just gets weird if you avoid it for awhile and then jump in the deep end. Ditto if I'm stuck on a computer without adblocking. You guys in my former culture which I'm no longer part of, are just weird.