Lessons Learned from This Year’s Top Stories in Pocket
Today, we unveiled Pocket Hits: Best of 2013. It’s a collection featuring the best of the 450 million items that were saved to Pocket this year.
To pull together the Best of 2013 list, we went beyond simply looking at what was most popular, and tied together all of the insights we have into what content was actually viewed, shared, and loved. The end result is a unique perspective on what the best content on the web looks like.
Unlike other top lists for the year, we won’t remind you of the top memes or rank the funniest .gifs (though we do include some great Vines). Instead, we bring you the most engaging, thought-provoking, and impactful stories that came out of this year.
Take a look at Pocket Hits: Best of 2013
We also learned quite a bit while creating this year’s list. Here’s some of what we noticed:
1. Medium handedly won Breakout Publisher of the Year
Since launching late in 2012, Medium has quickly emerged as one of the most popular places for saving content to Pocket. In under a year, Medium went from being non-existent to Pocket users, to jumping inside the top 50 most saved domains.
Though anyone can post, it seems that Medium is more than just another publishing platform. For instance, this year the site’s saves to Pocket blew past more established players in the publishing world – like The New Yorker, Fast Company, and The Economist – and landed 8 articles on our Best of 2013 list. What’s just as impressive is that these 8 stories were featured across 7 different categories (Long Reads, Science, Design, Finance, Health, Food, and Parenting), which only goes to show the diversity of content available on Medium.
You can check out this year’s top stories saved to Pocket from Medium here.
2. Pocket is Leveling the Playing Field
Although the Most-Saved Publishers of the Year include household names like YouTube and The New York Times, we were especially excited to see that 24 items named to the Best of 2013 were from less well-known places like personal blogs.
For instance, in the top Design articles of the year, you can find Karen X. Cheng giving a crash course on how to learn graphic design. Or in Literature, you’ll see “Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers” from Maria Popova.
We believe that when you create a platform to easily save and view content, you create an environment to allow high quality content to thrive. We’re seeing that excellent and timely stories will always rise to the top, regardless of where they came from.
3. People Are Interested in the Insights Companies Are Sharing
And speaking of leveling the playing field, companies are taking greater advantage of their blogs as a channel for putting interesting content in front of their users. It seems like their reach has expanded – 7 items from company blogs like Buffer, Kissmetrics, and Priceonomics made the cut for the Best of 2013 lists.
Most of the content features topics like product strategy, design, and how to write web content, which isn’t too surprising to show up in a company post. But there are some that catch you off guard, like how two of this year’s top articles in Health & Fitness were written by Buffer, a social media management tool.
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All of us at Pocket could not have asked for a more exciting year. We thank you for all of your support, and we hope you enjoy Pocket Hits: Best of 2013.
Here’s to the stories we’ll tell in 2014!
