Pocket, the read-it/watch-it/consume-it-later service formerly known as Read It Later, on Tuesday launched Pocket for Publishers, which aims to shed some light on that question. The free tool gives publishers a better idea of the lifespan of a story, by telling them the percentage of readers that are actually coming back to read content they’ve saved, and how long it takes them to return. Pocket is launching the tool with a handful of publishers, including GigaOM and paidContent.

Pocket for Publishers has two parts. On the front end, publishers can install a “Save to Pocket” button on their websites, can integrate the technology into their apps, and can add a custom message to the footer of any article or video saved from their site to help promote special content, their apps, their social media accounts, or other things.

On the back end, participating publishers access a dashboard that includes “includes top content and authors based on saves, opens and open rate, and new metrics that focus on longevity and engagement.” At left, you can see a sample of what that looks like, for Om Malik’s recent story “Google Reader lived on borrowed time: creator Chris Wetherell reflects.“

Launch partners (besides us) include The Verge, Buzzfeed, Longreads, USA Today, WordPress and The Next Web. Other publishers can sign up to request access.

Late last year, Pocket also rolled out subscription options for publishers that charge for content. Among the publishers already using this service are the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Review of Books and longform journalism site Matter. The subscription options aren’t automatically included in the new Pocket for Publishers, but users can request them.

Pocket has over 8.5 million users across the web, Mac, iOS and Android, and is also integrated into services like Flipboard and Zite. The company says that users saved content to Pocket 240 million times in 2012.

Pocket competitors include Instapaper, a paid app with about 2 million users, and Readability. (Readability offered a payment-sharing program for publishers, but ended it last year.) Amazon, too, hopes to compete in the space with a new “Send to Kindle” button for publishers.

Amazon presents “Send to Kindle” as an alternative to read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper:

“The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.”

The new feature for websites is the most recent in a line of read-it-later services Amazon has launched. Last year, the company announced a “Send to Kindle” button for Google Chrome, and later added support for Firefox. And users can already email files to their Kindles or transmit them using desktop apps. But the browser extensions — and now the web app for publishers — are Amazon’s effort to make the Kindle and Kindle apps an easy way to read all types of content, not just ebooks.

Developers who want to add the button can do so here, and the WordPress plugin is here.

“Obama’s Way” by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair came first followed by “The Busy Trap” in the New York Times and a series of techy-articles on topics like hacking and Apple. On the video front, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” — of course — led the way followed by an eclectic mix of clips about investing, body language and activism. You can see both top ten lists here.

While view-it-later services are undeniably popular, Pocket’s report raises two questions. First, how many people actually read that Michael Lewis article later rather than read-it-never? In my case, I put several items a week into my Instapaper folder but rarely get around to retrieving them (unless they’re for research). Pocket offers a graphic that suggests many people do in fact open the stuff they store but the chart doesn’t take account of multiple opens by the same person:

The other question about Pocket’s findings turns on the tech-heavy subjects of the top 10-list. While pieces like “The inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (#6, Chris Ziegler of The Verge) are popular among techies, such fare is too esoteric for most folks. My family and friends don’t read articles like that but prefer instead more universal subjects like food, travel, philosophy or sports. Does this mean Pocket’s growth will be mostly limited to computer types?

Probably not. These type of services are so useful that they are likely to enjoy widespread adoption soon. Meanwhile, publishers like BuzzFeed are making them even easier to use by adding “read it later” buttons right on their stories:

Finally, the popularity of “view-it-later” tools will continue to grow as products like Amazon’s Kindle add buttons of their own. For an easy-to-read overview of to use these Pocket and similar products, see my colleague Laura Owen’s helpful explanation here.

(Image by CREATISTA via Shutterstock)

Longreads offers membership for $3 per month or $30 per year and until now the only perk has been the good feeling that comes from supporting the site. In addition to exclusive content, members will “have the chance to recommend future Longreads Member exclusives. Tell us what you want to share with your fellow members (it can be a story, an excerpt, or something completely different), and if we like it too, we’ll find it and feature both you and your pick.”

“Our paid membership is still relatively small compared to the size of our overall community,” Longreads founder Mark Armstrong — who is also the editorial director of read-it-later service Pocket — told me, “but it’s grown enough over the past year that we wanted to start sending more perks to our members as a thank-you.”

The first exclusive is chapter six from Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book The Power of Habit. Longreads is licensing the chapter from Duhigg’s publisher, Random House, and will license future exclusives as well.

Other websites are also experimenting with content perks for paying members. My colleague Mathew Ingram recently wrote about tech commentary site Techdirt, which gives paying readers early access to blog posts, as well as other membership benefits.

You can download the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, it sends “news articles, blog posts and other web content” to Kindle, removing advertising and other distractions. You can also preview text before you send it or send only selected text on a page.

I tested “Send to Kindle” versus Pocket on my Kindle Touch and iPad. I sent this Pinterest iPad app article by my colleague Eliza Kern and this YouTube video about a cat and a tortoise to both.

Send to Kindle on iPad

Send to Kindle

On Kindle Touch: The Pinterest article arrived on Kindle Touch within a minute. The formatting looks good, with pictures obviously rendered in black-and-white. Links are intact and work in Kindle Touch’s experimental web browser.

The video does not work on Kindle Touch. It pulls all the text and still photos from the YouTube page.

On Kindle for iPad: Pictures in an article render in color and break up the flow of the text. (See screenshot, right.) This is also a problem in Pocket, but the design’s a little better.

Pocket on iPad

Pocket

On Kindle Touch: The process for getting Pocket articles onto a Kindle e-reader is not super-easy. You have to download your reading list into free ebook management tool Calibre. Then you can send the file wirelessly to Kindle using Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop version or email it to your Kindle email address.

Once you’ve done this, though, the reading process is great: Calibre compiles all of the articles into a magazine-like format that is easy to read on your Kindle. (If you use Instapaper, the process is easier — learn how to do it here.) So you can keep all of your articles in one “magazine” instead individually downloading them and storing them as separate files on your Kindle, the way you do with Send to Kindle.

Pocket supports the saving of videos, but you won’t be able to watch them on a Kindle Touch.

On Pocket for iPad: Easy and looks great when you have the Pocket iPad app installed. You can save all kinds of content, not just text. So I can watch my cat and tortoise video just fine.

Which one should you use?

The Send to Kindle Chrome browser extension is a good way to send text and articles to your Kindle e-reader quickly. If you want to get a single long article onto your Kindle, I’d go with the Chrome extension. But if you want to read many articles together in a magazine-like format, I really like Pocket, and I wish Kindle would  let you send a whole reading list, not just a single article.

If you primarily use Kindle for iPad, you shouldn’t use the Send to Kindle extension. Use a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper instead. They render text and graphics better, and Pocket lets you save video, not just text.

The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Read It Later relaunched as Pocket in April and made its app completely free. The company says it has nearly six million users, up from about 4.5 million in April, saving a million pieces of content a day. It is integrated into over 350 third-party apps, including Flipboard and Twitter. Thirty percent of the content saved to Pocket is saved from news and reader apps.

“Read It Later was profitable from the first day it launched its original, paid iPhone app,” Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told paidContent. Before today’s change to free, it’s been the number-one paid news app on Android and Kindle Fire. “However, just because our company made money, it doesn’t mean we were making it in a way that fit our business best.” Weiner said “part of the reason we raised money last summer was because I recognized this and had a different model I wanted to go after”; he said he’ll share more details about the new business model this summer.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

The new app makes it easier to filter content by type and to tag and organize it. The interface looks more like Flipboard or Pulse, with images instead of just a list of articles.

Users who already have Read It Later Pro just have to update the app to get Pocket. Users of the free version have to download Pocket separately.