Yeah I wonder if Google realized that people were reading long form content (much of it hosted off Google) without ads. Thus their own audience was being shunted off-site without revenue.
That interpretation only makes sense if you think Google would rather have more good little click monkeys than organizing good content...
From the lack of quality search results and the infestation of ads if you don't use an adblocker, I don't think that interpretation would be too far fetched.
Reader didn't have enough active employees to keep it running. Nobody inside Google worked on it any more, so it was just a zombie product running on inertia.
Reader's active users, though, tended to be influencers who read a lot and shared what they read with their friends on social media. So they still drove traffic, just by a different mechanism.
Many of the people I followed on Reader moved to Twitter after Google took it down and mimicked its social functions there. I'd wager they're still either using RSS readers or jury-rigging Twitter into being something like it.
