Pulse, the popular news-reading app for Android and iOS, just announced that its users have now read more than 4 billion stories since it launched in 2010. While it took the company 100 days to reach 10 million read stories, its users now read just as many posts every day.
As Pulse co-founder Akshay Kothari told me earlier this week, the average new Pulse user now reads about 30 stories per week just after they sign up, but after 10 weeks on the service, that number goes up to about 75 stories per week. The average Pulse user, Kothari said, comes back to the app three times per day and all of these numbers still continue to increase.
The most popular categories on the service are news, tech and entertainment (followed closely by sports). Overall, though, Kothari noted, there is also a strong interest in long-tail content like one-person travel or financial blogs.
Pulse Insights
To highlight the amount of data the company is now gathering by getting such a high-level view of what’s in the news, Pulse is launching “Pulse Insights” today. Every three to four weeks, the company will now release a report based on this information. “We hope,” the Pulse team writes in a blog post today, “that this project will benefit the entire ecosystem of news publishing, and will help it thrive in this era of immense technological and social change.” Besides this, of course, these reports will also help Pulse develop a voice as a thought leader in the news space as the industry continues to change at an accelerated pace.
Pulse now also uses its insights into what people are reading to curate more timely feeds for current events. Ahead of Hurricane Sandy making landfall a few days ago, for example, Pulse launched a dedicated channel with relevant news stories from its over 400 publisher partners. The company plans to expand this current events coverage over the coming months.