Nate Weiner
The other interesting piece of information to come out of Pocket is the vast disparity between what is saved to Pocket in aggregate and what is actually read and appreciated once saved. The vast majority of items saved to Pocket are short-form stuff: blog posts, BuzzFeed listicles, quick-hit news items, links gleaned from Twitter, and so on. Eighty-seven percent of Pocket’s saves by volume are things of this nature. The remaining 13% constitutes longform stories — the weighty New Yorker piece, the thoughtful New York Review of Books essay, and so on. But while that 13% constitutes the minority of Pocket content, it’s arguably the soul of what goes on inside Pocket.
…Metrics of “engagement” vary, but include: the likelihood of a user actually opening a piece, how often they open it, whether an item is shared, whether it’s favorited, and whether it was read through to completion or abandoned mid-scroll…
First publishers strained for the click; then the share; now, in the age of Pocket, they may need to try more holistic measures of “engagement” to gauge an article’s full worth.
Read the full piece at Fast Company