So, nobody was using Google Reader anyway, declining numbers and so on, eh?

icebraining · on March 16, 2013

It's a question of scale. When a company has services with more than 400 million users, a stagnant half a million is not that great.

Samuel_Michon · on March 17, 2013

I suspect the number of active GR users is closer to 50 million, seeing as 24 million people are subscribed to the CNN feed alone.

(I'm subscribed to hundreds of feeds, but CNN isn't one of them. I also think most users outside of the US won't be subscribed to the CNN feed.)

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/03/google-reader-data-...

Kylekramer · on March 17, 2013

If it was anywhere near 50 million active users, Google Reader would not have been shut down. Even if it was 25 million actives it would still be kicking. Plain and simple. Subscribing to CNN seems like the behavior of beginner RSS readers who abandon the concept. Seems like a good idea, but a general, high volume feed with more noise than signal for the average person doesn't really make sense for Google Reader user. I'd be shocked if the number of those actively reading the CNN feed was anywhere above 5 million.

For comparison, CNN on Twitter only has 7.7 million followers. Do you honestly believe 3x more people are reading CNN's RSS feed than their Twitter feed?

julianz · on March 17, 2013

Yep. RSS is a better way to read news. If I subscribe to an RSS feed then I get to pick through the whole thing at the point where I feel like reading it. Twitter just blasts past so fast it's gone in minutes, I miss maybe 90% of my Twitter stream (conservative estimate, it's probably more). I realise you can go and look at an individual Twitter feed but it takes several clicks to see the whole thing and it's not as fast as RSS.