Who was in charge of killing it?

Brian Shih would know, but would he ever tell?

Monetising by adding ads to a content, they fetched from other sites was a questionable back than. So, they couldn't just add ads to the reader easily.

They were believing google plus would be popular. So, having a closed social network, where they could control everything and put ads without any complains makes sense.

Besides, Reader was not that popular among the general public.

it doesn't matter that it wasn't that popular amongst the general public, they should have viewed it as having an enthusiastic user base and since sharing and commenting was part of reader, would be a way to encourage people to add content to google+. A social network is only as valuable as the content that gets placed on it. Killing reader shut off a mechanisms for sharing. I went from sharing articles I saw on RSS feeds via reader to a group of friends to sharing them on facebook.

I miss the leisure of just clicking a button to flag "hey look at this" and having a backlog queue of things by friends also thought was interesting. Nothing has really come around and recreated that simplicity and UX.

>How do you convince a bunch of blog authors to switch from 'free-to-air' and searchable everywhere RSS feeds, to move into closed social media platform?

I don't think the idea was to convince bloggers to switch, but rather to stop one good distribution channel from potentially competing with social media. Google kept Blogger alive, because people can still publish there AND distribute links via social media.

Speaking of blogs, I wonder if the death of Google Reader led to the death of blogs in general. It was about that time that people seemed to stop writing blogs and moved to Facebook/Twitter and their generally far shorter (and to me, less interesting) postings.

In hindsight, it seems that Google Reader could have offered a continuing alternative to social media. If Google had kept throwing resources behind it, they could have held a unique advantage against Facebook. It never would have gotten as big, but they still could have pushed it as an alternative and made more money than they ever got from Google+.