April 3, 2012

Read it Later
Apps like Read it Later have made it easier for people to save not just longform articles, but longform videos. New data released this morning show that video saves on Read it Later increased by more than 138 percent from January 2011 to January 2012.

The median length of Read It Later’s top 1,000 saved videos was nearly 30 minutes. Of the top 1,000 videos, 32 percent were more than five minutes long.

Read it Later’s Mark Armstrong and Matt Koidin say the idea that video on the Web should be kept short may be changing.

In an era of TED Talks, Khan Academy and university courses, we’re seeing evidence that users will embrace longform video if given the tools to do so in a way that fits with their daily lives. Of course, with 68 percent of videos saved under 5 minutes, short-form still rules: As our Most-Saved Videos list shows …, users love to save everything from music videos to animation, movie trailers, news clips and more. Shorter clips also represent the vast majority of video content produced for the web.

YouTube has been the most saved domain, followed by Vimeo and smaller sites such as Hulu and BrightCove.

Related: What do we mean by ‘longform journalism’ & how can we get it to go? | Gawker comes out on top in study of Read it Later users

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Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and the associate director of UT’s Knight…
Mallary Tenore Tarpley

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