Pocket Turns Out Unprecedented 240 Million Saves In 2012
December 20, 2012
The core service that is the essence of Pocket has been around since 2007. But it's the past year that has proven to be the first true watershed period in Pocket's five-year history.
Pocket, as you may already know, is formerly called Read It Later. Read It Later was launched five years ago as a sort of Tivo for Web content.
That is basically what it continues to be, even as rival services Instapaper and Readability have also become popular.
And even as its name has changed.
Read It Later officially became Pocket last April. And this name change was a telling argument for its use not only for reading articles later but also for viewing photos and videos later.
Indeed, along with the name change came a new design that highlighted Pocket's support for multimedia Web content, as opposed to just text-based Web content.
Available for free across various platforms, including iOS and Mac, Pocket automatically detects the type of content you've saved and displays it in an easy-to-read or easy-to-view layout.
As mentioned, this year has been an exceptional year for Pocket. And to show us what has made 2012 a banner period for Pocket, the team behind the popular read-and-view-later service has come up with the following infographic.
As indicated in the infographic, there have been 240 million saves to Pocket this year. Interestingly, this number is more than the number of saves in the prior four years combined.
Among the items saved to Pocket from January through December, the most-saved article is "Obama's Way" and the most-saved video is, unsurprisingly, "Gangnam Style."
Published in October, "Obama's Way" is Michael Lewis’s 13,000-word presidential portrait for Vanity Fair. "Gangnam Style" is, of course, the hugely popular music video, released in July, for the breakout K-pop song by South Korean entertainer PSY.
To see the lists of the ten most-saved articles and the ten most-saved videos in Pocket this year, head on over to the latest post on the official Pocket blog.
That post also includes a thank-you note from the Pocket team, which is, of course, grateful for the millions of users who this year have made hundreds of millions of saves to Pocket. I for one am happy to be one of them.
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