A good lower limit. Not everyone has the time or inclination to take immediate action. I'm a heavy user of Google Reader and I haven't yet taken an action. I probably won't for at least a few weeks.

What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Shockingly, nerds that consume media via RSS don't tend to click on ads.

Google Reader didn't have ads. I've seen guesses that Google didn't want to risk upsetting media producers by displaying ads with their content.

There used to be adsense for RSS. Google discontinued it sometime last year I think.

It was completely voluntary and managed by the producer through their AdSense account.

Yeah, But adsense publishers share the money with google. Same way blogger (blogspot) does.

I would've thought the readership data would be worth something as well, but perhaps they have that already via Google Analytics web-bugs?

Gathering a specific demographic, such as Greader's is the dream of many startups. Specific demographics may require specific monetization strategies, but that hardly makes the business a flop.

Sometimes, to score a goal you need to move the goal post. In this case, use a different monetization strategy.

I used reader more than most sites, and would have paid for it.

Bundles are where the money is at, not ads. Advertising is dead.

Agreed. I'm a big Google Reader user, and will inevitably be trying out Feedly, but just haven't had the chance yet.

Judging by the amount of people I've spoken too over the last few days, there's a whole lot more than 500,000 of us. I'd love to see how many people Google considers not worth their time. I'd happily pay for Reader.

Yeah, I would have been fine with $5-10/mo for Reader. $20/mo would hurt, and I would have bitched, but paid it.

Hm, anything more than $2-3/mo would be to much just for a reader access.

You should also count for the people who switched to an RSS reader that isn't Feedly. I, for one, started using The Old Reader.

I'd love to give The Old Reader a try... but when signing in through google, they seem to want "Manage My Contacts" permission.. there is no legitimate reason for needing to see my contacts to sign up. I'm pretty mindful of Android app permissions as well.

When I was signing in, I removed the contacts scope from the auth URL and The Old Reader didn't appear to care that it couldn't access my contacts.

I think they've replicated the social features of the old Greader, so they want your contacts so you can share with them.

If it said that it was asking for it and why, I may have allowed it, in any case it doesn't seem to ask for that anymore... :) Now, if my import would process already.

I tried that too. Currently there are 10000+ users in front of me in import queue. I hope they will be able to process it till July...

In the last two days only 500 people in front of me have left the queue. Feedly definitely gets point for their speed, but as others have stated the layout just isn't for me.

If you mean the goofy, information-poor magazine view, you can select the familiar-looking Titles view by clicking the gear icon over a feed.

Same here... I read all my news through Reeder on the iPad. I won't be taking action until I find out what services they plan to add to replace Google Reader.

Exactly. I'm waiting for word from the Reeder and NetNewsWire developers. Depending on the solutions (and timeframe) they come up with, I'm staying with Reeder or going back to NetNewsWire.

>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Or even just open source it and get some positive PR to offset the negative they've been getting.

This probably won't help. Google projects are typically built to run on their very specific infrastructure. It's unlikely that an open sourced version would be viable outside of Google. It's always possible though.

Maybe they could release a version that would run on AppEngine and customers could just pay for their own or something.

If the product was open sourced I would gladly pay a subscription to use it on Google's infrastructure, so I think your AppEngine idea is a good one.

Google can't open source Google Reader even if it wanted to because, to make connections and recommendations it used Google's Crawler which is part of the rest of Google's infastructure - something which Google definitely won't open source. As well as using Google's Crawler, the Google Reader team created separate recommendations to improve Google Reader and those people don't come cheap either - and giving up that knowledge is valuable to Google's competitors.

So.. give the subscribe/favorite/star portions and take out the recommendations.. most people rarely use that functionality.

Or it's people who have been thinking about using an RSS client and got caught up in the deluge of alternatives suddenly being offered much more loudly. /shrug