The Old Reader was started as a hobby project by Elena Bulygina, Dmitry Krasnoukhov, and Anton Tolchanov. In March 2013, it had only 10,000 users, but it started gaining popularity quickly after
Google announced that month that it would retire
Google Reader. By the end of April 2013, the project already had 200,000 users and Anton had to quit, leaving just Elena and Dmitry. By July 2013, The Old Reader team announced plans to close the public version of the service, following a significant increase in users after Google Reader's shutdown. At the time, the platform had 420,000 registered users, including 60,000 new sign-ups in a single day. The team announced their intention to close the public version of the reader, leaving only a private website for a limited number of people. However, a few days later, another announcement stated that the website will remain public, with support from an unnamed "corporate entity in the United States". In November 2013, the team mentioned that the new owner was Levee Labs. In March 2024, Ben Wolf, one of the owners of Levee Labs, posted on LinkedIn that they had closed an acquisition and that The Old Reader would have a new team taking over, but no more details were given since. ==Features==