Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafski | Hacker News Reader

RSS has always been a threat to Google's core business. From Google's perspective, RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads. Ads are Google's only product business-wise.

They've closed the threat containment phase (Reader) and are finally openly out to kill it.

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I see plenty of ads in my feeds. And nothing to stop Google from placing ads in Reader itself.

They still own FeedBurner, too, (until they shut it down).

Most of the ad supported feeds I'm subscribed to have one ad post per week. Most ad supported websites have many ads per article. Guess which medium makes Google more money?

You can change this to:

1 ad per week on a RSS feed vs 1 ad per week on an entire website

and the answer would still turn out to be Ad Supported Websites. RSS users are an insanely small group compared to overall users on the web. So yeah, Google probably just decided that supporting RSS just isn't worth their money/time regardless of how it compares to its other services.

But you can't (reliably) run JavaScript in RSS which means no AdWords and no profile/context advertising. That's the stuff advertisers love, not one-size-fits-all banners

And hasn't RSS use been declining anyway? Not much of a threat.

> RSS is a technique that allows you to read news raw, stripped off of website ads

Virtually no content site puts its entire article into the RSS feed. They want to monetize with ads even more than Google wants them to. If RSS was a threat to anything it would be social news services like G+ which depend on a non-federated model to maintain their walled gardens.

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