[derefr]

I'm not concerned about finding another RSS reader, or about the impact on "RSS as a standard." Mostly, I'm concerned that blogs I enjoy which are "at the margin" of traffic profitability will be killed when at least some of their subscription base stop following them on Reader, and then never start following anywhere else.

Ask any company who makes money from an email list what would happen if everyone suddenly became unsubscribed and they had to just sit and hope they would all subscribe again. Listen for the wails :)

[maigret]

In this case, the blog should be where the readers have migrated - G+, FB, Twitter, etc. If they were on the limit, it is probably because they couldn't capture an audience big enough anyway.

I'm concerned about the standard. Because having all information circulating through walled gardens is bad. My opinion is that the root cause is not that not enough people used GReader (you didn't wrote that, but others did), but rather that Google had no (good enough) revenue model with RSS.

If a sustainable and easy to use pay model finally emerges, then open standards would keep those different sources syndicated. Because syndication is not something people will give up soon, at the opposite.