Storify, the startup that lets anyone “curate” stories from around the web by collecting posts from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is today announcing its first-ever syndication deal. Through a new partnership with popular news reader Pulse, Storify’s curated feeds will now appear within Pulse’s app, allowing readers to subscribe to curated stories from a number of sources across tech, politics, social media and more.
For those unfamiliar with Storify, the service offers a different way to tell stories for the digital age. Instead of writing a blog post or producing a video, for example, Storify’s news tellers create timelines of content pulled in from third-party services including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, and more. It’s an entirely new way to present information for consumption, ideal for news readers’ shorter attention spans prompted by the never-ending stream of content coming from dozens of sources simultaneously.
In addition to being read on the site, Storify’s stories can also be embedded on any website using a single line of Javascript. The company had previously partnered with Breaking News, an MSNBC-owned Twitter account and associated services for realtime updates on news breaking around the world. This deal, however, made BreakingNews a new source for Storify’s stream, not a syndication partner.
According to Storify co-founder Burt Herman, the Pulse integration is the first time Storify has ever been syndicated to another platform. He says that, initially, there will be nine Storify feeds featured in Pulse, which offers apps for iOS, Android, Kindle and Nook. The plan is to add more based on user feedback.
“Pulse users can follow certain select user accounts that have been doing great work with Storify, including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and the White House,” explains Herman of the new offering. “We’re also offering our own Storify Featured Stories feed as a channel, where we curate the day’s best stories created across the platform – the same stories that are also featured daily on our own homepage,” he adds.
Storify now has 1.2 million users visiting its site as of March, up 50% from the prior month. During March, Storify’s stories were read 14 million times across all sites, including those were the feeds were embedded. For comparison’s sake, Storify, which launched into public beta this time last year, was averaging 6.5 million monthly views as of last August.
When the startup launched its iPad app this February, it reported that users had curated over 3 million social media objects to date. However, last month alone, users created 1 million objects on the service.
You can see the startup’s growth plotted here on Compete, which Herman says isn’t accurate in terms of numbers, but shows the general trend.
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