A lot can change in a year. Last December, we had a different name (Read It Later), and the service, founded in 2007, had welcomed its 4 millionth user.
A year later, we’ve settled in with our new name (Pocket!), we have a community that has nearly doubled in size—and as the chart below demonstrates, activity has taken off, inside Pocket and across our developer community.
All told, you “saved to Pocket” 240 million times from January through December, more than the prior four years combined.
What’s Popular in Pocket
Your most-saved article this year? “Obama’s Way,” Michael Lewis’s 13,000-word presidential portrait for Vanity Fair. Its popularity demonstrated the power of save-for-later when it comes to empowering people to embrace longform reading. In fact, 80 percent of all “opens” in Pocket happened after the story’s initial four-day rush of popularity—and for every one person who read “Obama’s Way” in Pocket, they introduced the article to an average of 1.4 others outside of Pocket.
The most-saved video in Pocket was (surprise!) PSY’s “Gangnam Style.” The music video remained within 50% of its peak popularity in Pocket for a whopping 58 days, and the graphic below shows that it truly was a viral phenomenon. The video didn’t even peak in Pocket until 70 days after it was first posted.
Thank You
As the holidays approach, we just wanted to say thank you for an incredible year. You helped turn Pocket into a chart-topping (and award-winning) app for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac, and your feedback has helped us make Pocket a simple, enjoyable way to save and view the content that matters to you.
Here’s one more data point we’re really proud of: Pocket released more than 40 updates this year across iOS, Android, Mac and beyond.
We’re excited for what’s next in 2013. Happy holidays from the entire Pocket team.
What We Saved to Pocket in 2012
10 Most-Saved Articles
1. “Obama’s Way” (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
2. “The Busy Trap” (Tim Kreider, New York Times)
3. “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking” (Mat Honan, Wired)
4. “I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How” (Gabriel Wyner, Lifehacker)
5. “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet” (Mat Honan, Gizmodo)
6. “How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything” (Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic)
7. “Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (Chris Ziegler, The Verge)
8. “Microsoft’s Lost Decade” (Kurt Eichenwald, Vanity Fair)
9. “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore” (Mat Honan, Wired)
10. “Why passwords have never been weaker, and crackers have never been stronger” (Dan Goodin, Ars Technica)
10 Most-Saved Videos
1. Gangnam Style (4 min.)
2. Salman Khan at TED 2011 (20 min.)
3. Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle (54 min.)
4. Sight (8 min.)
5. Dumb Ways to Die (3 min.)
6. DC Shoes: Ken Block’s Gymkhana Five (10 min.)
7. View from the ISS at Night (4 min.)
8. Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are (21 min.)
9. KONY 2012 (30 min.)
10. A Conversation with My 12-Year-Old Self (4 min.)
