Were they really not worth doing? Or just not worth Google doing? The latter has a much higher bar given the rate at which other parts of Google print money.
I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.
I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using Google Reader seems to cut down on the number of ads a user sees. And seeing as Google is at its heart an advertising company, why would they put effort into maintaining a tool that reduces the number of delivered ads?
I could certainly see a minority of Reader customers paying enough for the service to make a small team very comfortable. It would have been nice for Google to spin it out for this reason, though I suspect there were significant technical barriers.