How I like my Instapaper to look. A beautiful combination of Verdana and some great leading.
How will Pocket make money?
The newly named Pocket has not just done away with the Read It Later name and aesthetic, Pocket also does away with Read It Later’s model of having free and “Pro” accounts. So how will it make money?
Here is a quick run down on the main time shifting services for reading.
Readability
Readability has a free mobile app and a free web application, but offers users a way to make a monthly contribution that will be split across the content publishers that the user reads who have signed up with Readability. Readability keep 30% of user contributions as cost of doing business.
Instapaper
Instapaper makes money by selling a $4.99 iOS App. The web application is free and displays “ads via the deck” (which are the only ads that I like). Instapaper offers a $1 per month subscription for users in order to offer some extra benefits.
Almost nothing, except knowing that you are supporting the Instapaper service’s operation and future feature development.
Subscribers also get:
- Search all articles in your account.
- Ability to use third-party Instapaper API apps.
- Higher Kindle article limits and a “Send to Kindle” bookmarklet to send any page immediately.
- Higher RSS-feed limits and faster feed updates.
- An option to hide Instapaper’s ads
Pocket is completely free. The mobile apps are free to download. The web application is free and without advertisements. There is no option to pay a subscription. There didn’t seem to be a cost for 3rd party developers leverage their webservice’s API.
Read It Later now Pocket is VC backed, which allows them to operate with out an actual business model for the time being, but how do they plan to make this a viable self-sustaining business in the long term?
How will Pocket make money? And what does this mean for its users in the long run?
Note:
Evernote does have a browser plug-in called Clearly which provides a minimal web browser reading environment. Clearly also allows the user to save articles to their Evernote account so that the user can read the content at a later time, but lacks a mobile app and web app experience that present users with a great reading experience no matter where they are.
