Is Google Reader next on the chopping block?
micropersuasion.com
micropersuasion.com
If you're a newspaper company, would the pure cost be worth knowing exactly what columns your subscribers are reading? Absolutely.
Google Reader is a internal service where ads will only muck up what they have going for them.
(hint: Google Reader is extremely popular)
Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market.
If it's the best RSS reader on the planet, why even make the suggestion that such a service would just go away?
Google Reader is here to stay. I'm not worried.
Google has deep pockets. The reason they killed those products was not because they weren't making money, but because they weren't popular.
Your OPML list gives google a pretty good indication of what your primary interests are, which they can use to deliver better targeted ads throughout the ecosystem.
Google likely has fairly strong integration between blog search and reader; it's likely they'd be doing a fair amount of analysis and caching of this data in the first place, so why not build it into a full on service?