Within the limits of confidentiality and business ethics, can you explain what the issues are in a situation like this? I agree with other readers above that Reader is probably a poor source of ad clicks and thus direct revenue, but it seems like it would offer invaluable forward intelligence for Google (just as searches for 'influenza' and 'flu' have proved to be excellent leading epidemiological indicators). ISTM that the value proposition for Google was in mining the behavior of Reader users to identify what would be interesting/ popular/ important a week or a month from now, and would help to optimize the value of keyword searches etc in adwords.