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Google shutting down their RSS reader didn't really have an impact. They shut it down back in March of 2013. If you look at the trends graph[1] for RSS it was

• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Long-term Google trends graphs are kind of useless because they're a percentage of queries over a period of time when the demographics of the user base was changing as millions of new people got on the internet. Here's the one for javascript: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascript https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=javascri... Clearly javascript has been slowly dying out. But wait, that can't be right. They're also a poor proxy for usage because the existing user base with feeds already set up doesn't have to do a search query to continue using it, so if a large number of them lose access at once, it's barely a blip because they wouldn't be doing searches for it either way.
  • edgartaor 6y ago
    Do you know a better alternative? I would like to know
    • loup-vaillant 6y ago
      You probably didn't want to come across this way, but we should note that the absence of a better metric is not by itself a reason to use a bad one. If a metric is sufficiently decorrelated with the thing we want to measure, it should be ignored altogether, regardless of whether we have anything better.