--- title: "Google Dominated The Tools Behind RSS, Then Abandoned Them" description: "Google ran the most-used RSS reader and the biggest feed service, then closed or froze both. A look at what that did to open web subscriptions." dek: "RSS let readers subscribe to websites directly, without an algorithm in between. For most of the 2000s the software that made it usable belonged to Google — which then shut much of it down." published_at: "2026-08-02T13:23:55.787Z" updated_at: "2026-08-02T13:23:55.787Z" tags: - "Business" - "Infrastructure" - "Consumer" source_url: "https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds" source_domain: "openrss.org" canonical: "https://hex37.com/google-dominated-tools-behind-rss-then-abandoned-them" --- There is a version of the internet in which you decide what appears in front of you. You find a website you like — a local newspaper, a scientist's blog, a comic strip — and you click a button that says *subscribe*. From then on, new posts arrive in one list, in the order they were published, with nothing inserted, promoted or withheld. No account, no email address, no company sitting between you and the thing you asked for. That version exists. It is called RSS, and it has worked continuously since 1999. Almost nobody uses it deliberately anymore. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and the technology behind it is unglamorous. A website publishes a second, stripped-down copy of itself — a file listing recent articles with their titles, dates and text — in a standard format that software can read. A program called a feed reader checks that file periodically and shows you what's new. Because the format is standardised and belongs to no one, any reader can read any feed. It is the same principle that lets any email program open mail from any other. The argument made by [Open RSS](https://openrss.org/blog/how-google-helped-destroy-adoption-of-rss-feeds), a nonprofit project that runs feed infrastructure and campaigns for the format, is that this arrangement did not collapse on its own. It says Google came to control the most important pieces of the RSS ecosystem, and that when Google withdrew from them, ordinary users lost the on-ramps that had made feeds usable in the first place. ## The reader that everyone used, until it stopped existing Google Reader launched in 2005. It was free, fast, browser-based, and it required nothing of the reader beyond a Google account, which by then most people already had. Within a few years it had become the default way to follow feeds — so dominant that many smaller feed readers stopped competing with it and instead built themselves as front ends that synced with it. Reader was not just an application; it had become shared infrastructure that other companies' products depended on. In March 2013, Google announced it would close Reader that July, citing declining use. The shutdown is the moment usually pointed to as the end of mainstream RSS, and the reason is not only that a popular product disappeared. It is that a whole layer of dependent software broke at once. Apps that had relied on Google to store subscriptions and track which items you had already read had to build that machinery themselves or die. Some did the work. Many did not. Google's own explanation — that not enough people were using it — is genuinely part of the story, and any honest account has to hold both facts at the same time. Reader was small relative to Google's other products. It was also, by a wide margin, the largest thing in its own category, and its closure removed the category's centre of gravity. ## FeedBurner and the quiet dismantling of the plumbing The publishing side of the ecosystem followed a similar arc. FeedBurner was a service that sat between a website and its subscribers: publishers pointed their feed through it, and in return got audience statistics, email delivery and a feed that would not fall over under load. Google bought it in 2007, in a deal reported at around $100 million, and it became the standard way for a blog or small publisher to run a feed. Google then took it apart in slow motion. The programming interfaces that let other services build on FeedBurner were retired in the early 2010s. In 2021 the service was moved to what Google described as maintenance, with its email-subscription feature — for many small publishers the main reason they used it at all — switched off. What remained was a shell. Publishers who had routed their audiences through a Google address for a decade had to migrate or lose them. Around the same time, the visible cues disappeared from browsers too. The small orange feed icon that once appeared in the address bar of Firefox and Internet Explorer to signal *this page can be subscribed to* was removed across the industry; Mozilla stripped built-in feed subscription out of Firefox at the end of 2018. Google's Chrome, which passed 60 per cent of the global browser market during the 2010s, never shipped feed reading as a standard feature at all. It ran a limited "Follow" experiment on Android in the early 2020s that fed into Google's own recommendation surface rather than into an open reader, and did not keep it. For a non-technical user, this is the decisive change. The feed did not vanish from the website. The button that told you it was there vanished from the browser. ## Why a company built on advertising has no use for a subscribe button None of this requires a conspiracy, and the more interesting reading is that the incentives simply pointed elsewhere. An RSS feed delivers text to a program the publisher does not control. It carries no advertising slots that reliably render, no tracking scripts, no login wall, no way to count who read what. It is, from the point of view of a business that sells attention, a leak. What replaced it monetises far better. Social feeds, algorithmic recommendation surfaces and email newsletters all put an intermediary between reader and writer — one that knows who you are, measures whether you opened the thing, and can sell against it. Google's search results and Discover feed do the same job on Google's terms. A world where readers subscribe directly to a hundred websites is a world where a great deal of that measurement becomes impossible. The format itself never broke. Every podcast in existence is distributed over RSS; when you subscribe to a show, your app is polling a feed file exactly as a 2006 blog reader would have. Most blogging software still generates feeds automatically, YouTube still exposes them per channel, and a healthy set of independent readers exists. In 2026 the Electronic Frontier Foundation went as far as recommending feeds as a practical escape from algorithmic timelines. What was lost was not the plumbing but the discovery — the assumption, once built into browsers and into the biggest consumer product in the category, that following a website directly was a normal thing to do. Rebuilding that is a much harder problem than serving an XML file, and it is not one that any company with an advertising business has an obvious reason to solve.