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How many people are actually “reading it later”? Pocket launches tool for publishers

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:00:51 +0000

As web audiences increasingly shift to mobile devices and new reading platforms like Twitter and Flipboard, publishers are hungry to learn as much as possible about how consumption patterns are changing.

Pocket, the read-it/watch-it/consume-it-later service formerly known as Read It Later, on Tuesday launched Pocket for Publishers, which aims to shed some light on that question. The free tool gives publishers a better idea of the lifespan of a story, by telling them the percentage of readers that are actually coming back to read content they’ve saved, and how long it takes them to return. Pocket is launching the tool with a handful of publishers, including GigaOM and paidContent.

Pocket for Publishers has two parts. On the front end, publishers can install a “Save to Pocket” button on their websites, can integrate the technology into their apps, and can add a custom message to the footer of any article or video saved from their site to help promote special content, their apps, their social media accounts, or other things.

On the back end, participating publishers access a dashboard that includes “includes top content and authors based on saves, opens and open rate, and new metrics that focus on longevity and engagement.” At left, you can see a sample of what that looks like, for Om Malik’s recent story “Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects.“

Launch partners (besides us) include The Verge, Buzzfeed, Longreads, USA Today, WordPress and The Next Web. Other publishers can sign up to request access.

Late last year, Pocket also rolled out subscription options for publishers that charge for content. Among the publishers already using this service are the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books and longform journalism site Matter. The subscription options aren’t automatically included in the new Pocket for Publishers, but users can request them.

Pocket has over 8.5 million users across the web, Mac, iOS and Android, and is also integrated into services like Flipboard and Zite. The company says that users saved content to Pocket 240 million times in 2012.

Pocket competitors include Instapaper, a paid app with about 2 million users, and Readability. (Readability offered a payment-sharing program for publishers, but ended it last year.) Amazon, too, hopes to compete in the space with a new “Send to Kindle” button for publishers.

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Pocket’s Top 10 lists: view-it-later tools catching on — but will everyone use them?

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:16:08 +0000

Services like Pocket and Instapaper, which offer a one-click way to sock away internet content, are soaring in popularity. Pocket reports that 7.4 million users saved 240 million articles and videos in 2012 alone, and that 10.4 items are saved to Pocket every second. What were the most popular?

“Obama’s Way” by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair came first followed by “The Busy Trap” in the New York Times and a series of techy-articles on topics like hacking and Apple. On the video front, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” — of course — led the way followed by an eclectic mix of clips about investing, body language and activism. You can see both top ten lists here.

While view-it-later services are undeniably popular, Pocket’s report raises two questions. First, how many people actually read that Michael Lewis article later rather than read-it-never? In my case, I put several items a week into my Instapaper folder but rarely get around to retrieving them (unless they’re for research). Pocket offers a graphic that suggests many people do in fact open the stuff they store but the chart doesn’t take account of multiple opens by the same person:

The other question about Pocket’s findings turns on the tech-heavy subjects of the top 10-list. While pieces like “The inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (#6, Chris Ziegler of The Verge) are popular among techies, such fare is too esoteric for most folks. My family and friends don’t read articles like that but prefer instead more universal subjects like food, travel, philosophy or sports. Does this mean Pocket’s growth will be mostly limited to computer types?

Probably not. These type of services are so useful that they are likely to enjoy widespread adoption soon. Meanwhile, publishers like BuzzFeed are making them even easier to use by adding “read it later” buttons right on their stories:

Finally, the popularity of “view-it-later” tools will continue to grow as products like Amazon’s Kindle add buttons of their own. For an easy-to-read overview of to use these Pocket and similar products, see my colleague Laura Owen’s helpful explanation here.

(Image by CREATISTA via Shutterstock)

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Read-it-later service Pocket launches Mac app

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:11:00 +0000

Pocket, the web-content-saving company formerly known as Read It Later, has released a Mac app. The company, which says it has over 6 million users, already has Android, iOS, Kindle Fire and web apps.

Pocket, which was founded in 2007, raised $5 million in Series B funding in July and had said it would use the money to expand to more platforms.

Pocket for Mac features include offline access to saved content, “instant syncing across all devices, keyboard shortcuts, viewing of streaming video, the ability to share found content, and great organizing and search features.”

The reading experience on Pocket for Mac is fairly similar to that on Pocket’s other apps. There are also a couple of new features: You can re-download an article if it hasn’t loaded correctly, or “report article view” if something continuously fails to render. And you can save articles from the clipboard or using drag-and-drop.

On its blog, the company notes, “To create the new Mac app, we tapped into Pocket’s developer community. Michael Schneider, the creator of the popular third-party Mac app Read Later, joined Pocket to help us create this official Mac version of Pocket.”

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Listen up! Pocket reads saved articles aloud on Android

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:29:54 +0000

One of my most used free apps, Pocket, added the ability to read articles aloud on Google Android devices on Tuesday. Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket lets you read saved web pages while offline, and the newest version takes advantage of text-to-speech capabilities in Android. With the “Listen” feature, you can now hear the text of saved web pages anytime you have a few minutes in a quiet space.

I tested the new Listen functionality in Pocket and it works quite well. On my Galaxy Nexus phone with Android 4.1, there was no configuration involved, nor any speech engines needed to install. I simply updated Pocket, went to a recently saved article in the app and hit the Listen button in the app menu. You can pause the reading and control the speed through a Fast/Slow toggle bar.

One of the main reasons I use Pocket as my web clipping platforms is the widespread support across many devices: I can save articles from any browser and read them on practically any device, including those running iOS. Unfortunately, the Pocket team has no immediate plans to bring the Listen feature to iOS because “iOS doesn’t currently provide a text-to-speech API.”

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Longreads offers some exclusive content to paying members

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:09:06 +0000

Longform journalism site Longreads, which curates long stories from around the web that are “best enjoyed away from your desk,” has started offering paying members “exclusive access to stories that aren’t available anywhere else on the web, produced by the best publishers and writers in the world.”

Longreads offers membership for $3 per month or $30 per year and until now the only perk has been the good feeling that comes from supporting the site. In addition to exclusive content, members will “have the chance to recommend future Longreads Member exclusives. Tell us what you want to share with your fellow members (it can be a story, an excerpt, or something completely different), and if we like it too, we’ll find it and feature both you and your pick.”

“Our paid membership is still relatively small compared to the size of our overall community,” Longreads founder Mark Armstrong — who is also the editorial director of read-it-later service Pocket — told me, “but it’s grown enough over the past year that we wanted to start sending more perks to our members as a thank-you.”

The first exclusive is chapter six from Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book The Power of Habit. Longreads is licensing the chapter from Duhigg’s publisher, Random House, and will license future exclusives as well.

Other websites are also experimenting with content perks for paying members. My colleague Mathew Ingram recently wrote about tech commentary site Techdirt, which gives paying readers early access to blog posts, as well as other membership benefits.

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Should you use Kindle’s new read-it-later feature?

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:22:12 +0000

Hoping to compete with services like Pocket (formerly Read It Later) and Instapaper, Amazon has launched a “Send to Kindle” browser extension for Google Chrome. Support for Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari is coming soon.

You can download the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, it sends “news articles, blog posts and other web content” to Kindle, removing advertising and other distractions. You can also preview text before you send it or send only selected text on a page.

I tested “Send to Kindle” versus Pocket on my Kindle Touch and iPad. I sent this Pinterest iPad app article by my colleague Eliza Kern and this YouTube video about a cat and a tortoise to both.

Send to Kindle on iPad

Send to Kindle

On Kindle Touch: The Pinterest article arrived on Kindle Touch within a minute. The formatting looks good, with pictures obviously rendered in black-and-white. Links are intact and work in Kindle Touch’s experimental web browser.

The video does not work on Kindle Touch. It pulls all the text and still photos from the YouTube page.

On Kindle for iPad: Pictures in an article render in color and break up the flow of the text. (See screenshot, right.) This is also a problem in Pocket, but the design’s a little better.

Pocket on iPad

Pocket

On Kindle Touch: The process for getting Pocket articles onto a Kindle e-reader is not super-easy. You have to download your reading list into free ebook management tool Calibre. Then you can send the file wirelessly to Kindle using Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop version or email it to your Kindle email address.

Once you’ve done this, though, the reading process is great: Calibre compiles all of the articles into a magazine-like format that is easy to read on your Kindle. (If you use Instapaper, the process is easier — learn how to do it here.) So you can keep all of your articles in one “magazine” instead individually downloading them and storing them as separate files on your Kindle, the way you do with Send to Kindle.

Pocket supports the saving of videos, but you won’t be able to watch them on a Kindle Touch.

On Pocket for iPad: Easy and looks great when you have the Pocket iPad app installed. You can save all kinds of content, not just text. So I can watch my cat and tortoise video just fine.

Which one should you use?

The Send to Kindle Chrome browser extension is a good way to send text and articles to your Kindle e-reader quickly. If you want to get a single long article onto your Kindle, I’d go with the Chrome extension. But if you want to read many articles together in a magazine-like format, I really like Pocket, and I wish Kindle would let you send a whole reading list, not just a single article.

If you primarily use Kindle for iPad, you shouldn’t use the Send to Kindle extension. Use a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper instead. They render text and graphics better, and Pocket lets you save video, not just text.

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Pocket (formerly Read It Later) raises $5m in second funding round

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:00:37 +0000

Pocket , the company for saving online content formerly known as Read It Later, has raised $5 million in a Series B funding round and will use the money to expand its platform.

The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Read It Later relaunched as Pocket in April and made its app completely free. The company says it has nearly six million users, up from about 4.5 million in April, saving a million pieces of content a day. It is integrated into over 350 third-party apps, including Flipboard and Twitter. Thirty percent of the content saved to Pocket is saved from news and reader apps.

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Readability ends publisher payment program

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:41:59 +0000

Readability, a web and mobile app that lets users save content to read later, is ending the publisher payment program it launched in February 2011. Many readers paid — but most publishers didn’t collect the funds.

Readers were never required to pay, but they could donate $5 or more each month and $3.50 of that money would be allocated to the publishers whose content they read. Readability once offered a premium option to those who paid, but since January all users have had access to the same features. (Similarly, competitor Read It Later went entirely free and renamed its app Pocket in April.)

Readability CEO Richard Ziade explains the end of the program on the company’s blog:

“Two things needed to happen for the publisher payment plan to be a lasting success. One, a large group of readers needed to support writing through Readability. Two, a large group of publishers needed to accept that support.

“The first part went well. Thousands of you agreed to spend $5 a month (and sometimes more). But the second part proved difficult. Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers.

“And the great majority of those publishers never registered. Out of the millions—yes, millions—of domains that flowed through Readability, just over 2,000 registered to claim their money. As a result, most of the money we collected—over 90%—has gone unclaimed. As of today there’s nearly $150,000 in earmarked money sitting in a separate, untouched bank account.

So what happens to that $150,000? Publishers who registered with Readability get the money they’re owed. Publishers who are owed money but haven’t registered with Readability can do so by July 15. (“We need to verify site ownership to keep others from claiming your money,” Readability explains.) Any unclaimed money will be donated to “non-profit organizations that speak to the spirit of supporting reading and writing” (first up: 826 Valencia and Knowbility).

Reaction to the end of the program is mixed:

One commenter calls it “a sleazy business model,” saying, “I never gave you permission to collect money on my behalf, and you made it Opt-In for me to hand over my contact information to you in order to collect any of it – something I do not want to do.”
A publisher who did sign up says, “I was always skeptical of the model, but I don’t mind paying a fee for an excellent service, or for excellent content from the publishers. Keep up the great work. And brace yourselves for the continual shitstorm that’s just started here.”

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Instapaper for Android arrives. Will users buy it?

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 14:54:31 +0000

Another of the most popular iOS applications makes the move to Android as Instapaper is now available in Google Play. The useful software saves web pages for offline reading and re-formats them to remove all of the clutter often found around the content, providing a focused consumption experience. The Android version costs $2.99, which is interesting as Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, removed his free iOS version some time ago an opted for a paid model. Arment has noted that Android users prefer free software, so will they buy his app or opt for a free alternative?

The Verge has an exclusive, early look at Instapaper for Android, showing two minor differences between it and the iOS app: no true full-screen reading due to Android’s status bar and no pagination. All of the other features and customization options are there, save for a just-added background sync function added to iOS based on location; your saved stories can sync when get home or arrive at the office, for example. If you’re an Instapaper user already and have been waiting for an Android version, I don’t see any reason not to try the app, even at $2.99. There’s always the 15-minute return policy in Google Play if the Android version doesn’t meet your needs.

What I find interesting about the app is that it exists at all. Arment is a huge proponent of all things Apple and I don’t begrudge him that: He’s often right. But he also feels that Android users in general don’t pay for software, so why bother? In some sense, he really didn’t, as the development work was outsourced to the team that builds Tumblr’s mobile app. Arment didn’t code the Android version, so while he may have invested money in the development, he didn’t invest himself. In fact, as of the time of this writing, the Instapaper blog doesn’t even mention the new Android version.

I see this as more of an experiment for Arment and a way to get Android users asking “Where’s Instapaper for my phone?” to stop asking. They won’t ask any more, but will they pay? Big fans of Instapaper — there are plenty, and with good reason — are sure to buy, but I suspect most Android users won’t. Pocket, which until recently was called Read It Later, is not only free, but supported on far more platforms.

As much as I like Instapaper on my iOS devices, I’m not always using an iOS device and therefore I gravitated towards Pocket. Apple’s iOS devices are hot sellers and great, but I think we’re on the cusp of moving beyond single-platform apps towards software and services that work on whatever device we have in hand. Thoughts?

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Read It Later’s app goes free and gets a new name, Pocket

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:00:43 +0000

Read It Later is making its app completely free — no more $2.99 Pro version — and renaming it Pocket to express “how simple it is to take any content users discover with them, no matter where they go.”

“Read It Later was profitable from the first day it launched its original, paid iPhone app,” Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told paidContent. Before today’s change to free, it’s been the number-one paid news app on Android and Kindle Fire. “However, just because our company made money, it doesn’t mean we were making it in a way that fit our business best.” Weiner said “part of the reason we raised money last summer was because I recognized this and had a different model I wanted to go after”; he said he’ll share more details about the new business model this summer.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

The new app makes it easier to filter content by type and to tag and organize it. The interface looks more like Flipboard or Pulse, with images instead of just a list of articles.

Users who already have Read It Later Pro just have to update the app to get Pocket. Users of the free version have to download Pocket separately.

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