For the second year running, I finished the year in the Top 1% of Pocket readers worldwide. Of course, percentile rankings like these are useless without more data on Pocket’s users, many of whom I suspect downloaded the app but rarely use it. Even still, I’m a verifiable maniac when it comes to reading, fueled by Pocket and Kindle. Here’s the stats Pocket released for my “Year in Review”:
- 5,599,107: words read
- 119: books-equivalent
- 1,332,737: average words read by my Facebook and Twitter connections who use Pocket
- Most saved topics (Pocket’s categories): Current Events, Health, Travel, Sports, Education
On June 23, 2015, I started logging every Pocket article I’ve read and starred using a combination of IFTTT and Google Sheets. The IFTTT recipes save the Article Title, Date Added, Tags, Excerpt, and URL to a Google Sheet whenever an item is archived in Pocket. Every once in a while, I manually enter the publication (e.g. New Yorker) in the Source column.
Here’s the resultant sheet with nearly every article I’ve read since June 2015.
And here’s the one for every starred (favorited) article.
Feel free to browse around and see my reading habits. There’s some basic data mining and analysis to be done once I have some time to play around with it, like aggregating tags and such. I’ll update this post after I’ve done the crunching.
The Stats:
Most read publications: The Atlantic (182), The New York Times (181), Grantland (163, R.I.P.), The Washington Post (127), The New Yorker (105), The New York Times Opinion pages (90), FiveThirtyEight (82)
Average articles saved per month (June – December): 259
