When you are Google, you have millions in funding, almost unlimited engineering ressources, political connections and many good reasons why a project would be successful (journalists, audience, users, accounts, etc)

Once you transfer the responsibilities; all of the support that kept the project stay afloat disappears. It's not sustainable anymore, there is much limited growth, all the business model for exploiting data for advertising cannot exist anymore, etc.

Well, it's dead you know.