Re: costs, don’t forget that Google was already saving all of that content for search - they still use feeds to get content updates.

On the topic of monetization, this was covered in some of the articles at the time. This isn’t the best one but:

https://gigaom.com/2013/03/13/chris-wetherll-google-reader/

“ Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”

“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears.”

http://massless.org/?p=174 goes into more detail about the history and I think in retrospect the subsequent decade really supports his argument that Google leadership is unwilling to try to create new markets rather than enter already proven ones. Trying to barge in on Facebook with an unwanted, un-QAed Google+ only left Facebook stronger and ensured that all subsequent Google products had launch-day questions about cancellation because so many influential people used Reader.

Thank you for the links. I have not read these before and there are some very interesting snippets of information I was unaware of.

It wasn't really mentioned in the interview but I just remembered that AdSense for feeds was a thing, however it was very poorly received and did little to solve their conundrum.

Feedburner similarly seems like something they could have monetized but nobody felt pressure to try very hard when the company was making so much money. It probably would have been a rounding error in their existing revenue stream but new markets don’t happen by accident.

> No competitors to reader had the resources to offer a comparable product.

What criticial feature did Reader have that is not comparable in the competitors? Honest question, when Reader shutdown I imported my data in a competitor service that I use to this day.

Reader essentially had, on its backend, a complete archive of every single feed it had been indexing since 2005. A lot of personal sites and blogs have since disappeared entirely or lost some of their content through various misadventure, yet I was able to recover a lot of invaluable information with reader. This is, of course, something of questionable legality and hence my earlier comments about potential liabilities.

Other feed aggregators may have better UX or social integration (IIRC reader have always had an open API available in case you preferred a different client software) but none was or is able to replicate what reader has done for me.

True, letting you access posts from before you subscribed (if that's what you mean) was unique (as far I know) to Reader.