Really Reading It Later

I guess I'm not the only one who feels like it's impossible to find time to read all the interesting articles that cross my path. Four million people have signed up with startup Read it, a content-saving service that wants to do for web content what TiVo did for TV. And now that people have a simple way to save articles for later reading, the big question is... do they?

Read it Later hasn't answered this question outright. But they have published some interesting numbers about which authors get the highest return rate (how often users return to a story once it's saved). The author with the absolute highest return rate is Drew Magary of the sports blog Deadspin. His return rate is 83%. Authors writing about sports, news, and gaming dominate the top 20. Once you get to the bottom of the top 20 list, return rates hover around 70%.

Interestingly, there's some incongruence between what kinds of content people save and what they return to read. How-to articles are the most commonly saved, but not the most commonly returned to. It makes sense that people would feel more urgency to read time sensitive articles than instructional ones.

One can only speculate what the overall return rate might be. For myself, it seems that any time I have a moment to sit down and do some reading, going back to a saved list would usually be trumped by checking out what's new. But it's interesting to see that, at least for some types of content, people are returning. And it's a very interesting new way to measure loyalty to authors.