How Publishers Are Using Read-Later Apps to Reach Audiences

For publishers on the hunt for habitual readers, read-later apps like Pocket have become valuable stalking grounds. The 14-year-old company, which was acquired by Mozilla in 2017, has received something of a facelift in the last year––its updated design now emphasizes discovery––due in part to a rising interest in the read-later space. Driven by the increasingly-fragmented nature of consumption, readers now routinely encounter articles on a dozen different platforms in a given day. This has made Pocket’s basic utility as a storage locker for users’ bookmarked content more vital, said CEO Matt Koidin. Sensing opportunity, new entrants, such as Matter and Upnext, have entered the space. Pocket, largely thanks to its seniority and affiliation with Mozilla, dwarfs the competition: It reaches 35 million monthly visitors across all markets via its placement on the Firefox News Tab, while the app itself attracts 2 million users monthly, according to Koidin. Its daily newsletter, Pocket Hits, has 4 million free subscribers and a 20% open rate. LinkedIn Adds LinkedIn Live, Newsletters to Creator Mode Readers, who populate the app only with the writing they find most compelling, provide Pocket with clear signals about their interests, and it released its annual Best Of Pocket list on Wednesday. The company generated $10 million in revenue in 2019 through advertising and its subscription offering, and it’s grown 50% year-over-year since, Koidin said. Publishers have taken notice. The newsletter renaissance has underscored the value of routine readers, especially when it comes to generating and retaining digital subscriptions. At Texas Monthly, for instance, Pocket readers spend 240% more time on the site compared to average readers, and return at a rate 17% higher than normal, said vp of innovation Brett Bowlin. That makes Pocket, with its high-intent audience, a potential source of desirable readers, said Allison Fass, the vp of digital growth at Fast Company and Inc. “Pocket Hits and the Firefox homepage both drive audiences to us and we really like those audiences,” Fass said. “If you're looking for a measure of engagement for content, Pocket has a spectacular one.” In hopes of tapping into that audience, in recent months publishers like Fast Company, Inc., Slate, The Atlantic and Texas Monthly have found creative new ways to partner with the app. Slate, Texas Monthly and The Atlantic are using Pocket to attract new audiences In August, Slate announced that it had partnered with Pocket to curate a group of articles on Pocket, called Collections, to accompany its slate of narrative podcasts. The articles, drawn from across the web and sometimes dating back decades, are the “hosts’ notes,” said Bill Carey, the director of strategy at Slate: Many are first-person documents, such as C-SPAN clips or radio segments, that the podcast producers used to report out the story. After experimenting with the concept on four of its podcasts over the summer, Slate unveiled a Collection in November for the new season of its most-popular podcast, Slow Burn. This season, the podcast explores the beating and trial of Rodney King, and fans can dig deeper into the story via the Collection. Likewise, Pocket readers can discover Slate’s podcasts when browsing through Collections, said Carolyn O'Hara, the senior director of content discovery at Pocket. Carey declined to provide the number of new listeners the exchange has generated, though he conceded that the friction of the podcast-to-read-later-app pipeline might yield only a small number. But if they are highly-engaged readers, the tradeoff is worth it, Carey said. “We've been really excited so far by the way that these supplementary guides can help us find new audiences on Pocket,” Carey said. “It’s all about getting them in the door.” Texas Monthly is launching a similar initiative on Dec. 7, Bowlin told Adweek, in tandem with the debut of its new narrative podcast series, America's Girls, a chronicle of the history of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The Atlantic will also be partnering with Pocket to promote its podcast, The Art of Happiness, Adweek has learned. Both publishers specialize in longform writing and cultural analysis, a demographic common among Pocket users, creating the potential for a fruitful crossover. Syndication and newsletter sponsorships Another Pocket partnership, its syndication program, is a new twist on an old favorite. Pocket has over 60 publishers in its syndication cohort, including companies like The Atlantic, Hearst and Bloomberg Media, as well as smaller publishers like Nautilus and Substack authors like Anne Helen Peterson, O’Hara said. As part of the program, Pocket finds evergreen writing from publishers and pays them between $125-$200 per story to recirculate the article, according to a source familiar with the pricing. The syndication suite enriches Pocket’s platform while repurposing great writing that has suffered from the recency bias of the internet. At Nautilus, for example, Pocket accounts for 21% of its monthly traffic, and its syndication program can drive bursts of exposure to overlooked stories, said publisher John Steele. “With Pocket, syndicated pieces that normally get 100,000 page views per month … increase to over 700,000 per month,” Steele told Adweek via email. “So Pocket is a big part of Nautilus.” Pocket also allows publishers to sponsor its newsletter, Pocket Hits, giving them an opportunity to promote their content to a larger audience of dedicated readers. The Wall Street Journal, which has worked with Pocket since 2018, now has a monthly Pocket Hits partnership. It plans to extend the promotional efforts to Barron's and MarketWatch as well, according to a source. “Pocket is a meaningful source of traffic for publishers, both in quantity and quality,” O’Hara said. “We hear often that it can be a traffic cannon, but also that the readers who stick around, they convert better or they stay on site longer. Because they are content consumers, right? So the marriage makes a lot of sense.”

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How Publishers Are Using Read-Later Apps to Reach Audiences in New Ways

Slate, Texas Monthly and The Atlantic have announced partnerships with Pocket

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