4 Billion Stories Later, Introducing Pulse Insights

A staggering four billion stories have now been read on the Pulse platform since we launched in May 2010. It took us about 100 days to reach our first 10 million stories; today we see more than 10 million stories read every day. These numbers are more than just impressions, views, or swipes—they mean that Pulse users are expanding their worlds, through compelling news articles, insightful blog posts, and engaging videos.

Not only have Pulse users logged billions of stories, the number of stories read per person, per day, is increasing. These statistics contrast the gloomy outlook we hear so often about the news industry: we see that people are indeed reading news, and more of it, in more diverse ways than we could have ever anticipated. It’s clear that today’s world is a global village—people are weaving media into their lives in unpredictable ways, and getting their news from a dazzling variety of sources. Staying relevant is suddenly a question of where people read, not just what people write.

We at Pulse have ridden the wave of this rapid change in the way people read and access news, and now we’re looking to the future. We have a wealth of knowledge about how our own community engages with the news, and we can use this data to help uncover different and important information about this evolving industry.

This wellspring of information has inspired us to launch Pulse Insights, a data and design initiative that will report on shifts in the world of publishing and reading from the perspective of our community. We hope 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.

In the coming months, look forward to us covering topics such as:

• Is there a difference between what iOS and Android users read?
• How are Americans informing themselves (or not) for the upcoming U.S. election?
• What is the average lifecycle of a news story?
• How do reading patterns differ between mobile and web, tablets and phones, Macs and PCs?
• Send us your suggestions - you can email us at feedback@pulse.me

By sharing insights inferred from collective reading across the Pulse community, we hope to help expand the conversation around news and information. We hope to spur the worldwide communities of readers, publishers, authors, journalists, technologists to even greater innovation.

Cheers,

Akshay, Ankit & the Pulse team