“with Reader the thought probably was "we will aggregate online content created by others and will add ads to the result. Then profit!" This was replaced with "we will aggregate social content, the add lots of ads. Then profit!"”
And why didn't they just do that? They gave no explanation whatsoever. Google Reader has/had millions of users, surely Google could've capitalized on that.
After Google's announcement, Feedly announced they received 500,000 signups in two days, so apparently there were plenty of Google Reader users left.
I'm also willing to bet that if there was a decline in Google Reader users, it had something to do with the web app being neglected for so long and Google having taken away several useful features in the last couple of years.
Anyways, “usage was declining” was their argument for pulling the plug, but not an explanation of why they never tried to capitalize on the service.
500,000 is the sort of number that is huge to a company like Feedly and can't even be distinguished from day-to-day noise in the statistics to a company like Google.
And why didn't they just do that? They gave no explanation whatsoever. Google Reader has/had millions of users, surely Google could've capitalized on that.