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Comment by shawndumas | Hacker News Reader

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shawndumas

"This, from the company that shitcanned Google Reader because they wanted to “focus”."

--http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/28/google-shopping-...

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Google makes money by showing ads to people who want to buy things.

If everyone goes to eBay and Amazon instead of Google to buy things, no one will buy ads from Google.

If Google can provide a compelling alternative to eBay and Amazon, they reduce the risk that people stop shopping on Google and that people stop buying ads on Google.

This looks like Google focusing on their bottom line.

But they aren't exactly targeting online shopping via Google. They are using established retailers that aren't exactly known for showing Google ads on their sites. So, I don't quite see how this fits.

To be fair, with Reader the thought probably was "we will aggregate online content created by others and will add ads to the result. Then profit!" This was replaced with "we will aggregate social content, the add lots of ads. Then profit!"

The thought with Express might go like this: "By pushing the envelope on buying things online, more people will buy thing online than offline, expanding the e-commerce universe. This would translate into higher advertising fees. Then profit."

In other words, they believe that expanding e-commerce will be more profitable than helping two dozen power users consume mostly as free content easier.

“with Reader the thought probably was "we will aggregate online content created by others and will add ads to the result. Then profit!" This was replaced with "we will aggregate social content, the add lots of ads. Then profit!"”

And why didn't they just do that? They gave no explanation whatsoever. Google Reader has/had millions of users, surely Google could've capitalized on that.

Their explanation was usage was declining. And despite the fact Reader users are vocally upset, I have seen no evidence that contradicts that.

After Google's announcement, Feedly announced they received 500,000 signups in two days, so apparently there were plenty of Google Reader users left.

I'm also willing to bet that if there was a decline in Google Reader users, it had something to do with the web app being neglected for so long and Google having taken away several useful features in the last couple of years.

Anyways, “usage was declining” was their argument for pulling the plug, but not an explanation of why they never tried to capitalize on the service.

500,000 is the sort of number that is huge to a company like Feedly and can't even be distinguished from day-to-day noise in the statistics to a company like Google.

Self fulfilling prophecy.

One of a couple of glaring examples today of how biased and emotion-driven DF is.

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