AOL Reader

» see reader.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

this one i actually used, briefly. i was on google reader for years, on ttnet broadband in ankara, running a folder called "turkce" and a folder called "tech" and a folder called "gunluk" and reading through the whole thing every morning with coffee. when google announced in march '13 that reader would die on 1 july, the whole rss population went into migration panic. i tried feedly, i tried digg reader, i tried aol reader. i ended up on feedly and stayed there.

aol reader launched on 24 june '13, a week ahead of google's kill date. it was a straight-shot google-reader clone, three-pane web interface, folder-based subscription structure, keyboard shortcuts that roughly matched what people had muscle memory for. the OPML import worked, you could point it at your exported google reader file and it took the entire subscription tree. the mobile experience was thinner than digg reader's or feedly's, which is where the churn came from once the initial migration wave settled.

aol was not the first name anyone in 2013 associated with rss. the whole thing had a "wait, aol still does new products?" quality to it. but the team that built it was small and moved fast, they got the ship-window right, and the product was competent. it was one of the last things aol shipped before verizon bought them in june '15 and the whole portfolio started getting rationalized.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the aol reader team had done the reasonable work of copying google reader's interface without copying its mistakes. the star + share primitives were there, the "read all" button was there, the counters worked. the two things missing at launch were an api for third-party clients (which meant it could not integrate with reeder or press) and native mobile apps (the mobile web view was fine but not smooth).

by late 2013 the RSS-replacement landscape had settled: feedly was the mass-market winner because it built its own backend and shipped good mobile apps, inoreader had the power-user crowd, digg reader had brand recognition, the old reader kept the "google reader ui exactly" purists, aol reader had the aol brand and the users who signed up because they wanted an alternative to the two obvious winners. that fifth-place niche was not zero but it was not much.

~ the day it died ~

on 6 december 2017 aol posted an announcement that reader would shut down on 3 january 2018 (verified via a hacker news thread the same day). users were given about four weeks to export their OPML files. no reason given publicly beyond the standard portfolio-focus language. AIM had been killed a couple of weeks earlier, on 15 december '17. the aol brand itself was being phased out into oath, the verizon media division that would later become simply "verizon media" and then just die into yahoo again.

in those days, aol was rationalizing what it kept. reader did not have paid tier revenue, it did not have platform ad revenue in the way the main aol homepage did, and it had a small audience that was already double-subscribed to feedly and inoreader anyway. keeping the servers running was pure infrastructure cost with no upside. the shutdown was clean, the export was clean, nobody lost data. that was the best-case ending for an rss reader in the 2017-2018 window.

~ the long tail ~

by 2026 feedly is still running. inoreader is still running. the old reader is still running. newsblur is still running. what feels notable in retrospect is that all the surviving rss readers are still the same small independent operations. neither aol nor google nor digg (with betaworks) could make an rss reader survive inside a larger portfolio. it turns out the format works exactly the way it worked in 2005, but the economics only work when the whole company is just this one product.

i still have my OPML file in a dropbox folder somewhere, exported from google reader in june 2013, imported into feedly, exported from feedly and re-imported once more when i moved off dropbox in like 2019. the same subscription list has now outlived google reader, aol reader, digg reader, its original owner's blog, and probably its next home too.

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