“Remind to Read” button on your Medium posts (or anything)
Hey all!
I made Remind To Read two years ago when I worked at The New Yorker. (http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/cant-finish-a-new-yorker-story-online-the-magazine-will-now-send-you-an-email-reminder-to-come-back/.)
We launched it in response to the fact that there was a huge bounce rate after the first page view on long form articles. I wanted to create something that would bring readers who were interested in reading, back to the article. I felt like the existing consumer focused services like Pocket, Readability, or bookmarklets had their own faults. Most people would let a bookmark chain pile up, and then wouldn't ever look at their link collection. Remind to Read was meant as a solution to this problem, from the publisher side.
I recently re-launched this with a focus on Medium.com. Since there are a growing number of long form writers and great long form content on Medium, I wanted to provide a way for writers to give their audience a simple way to come back.
I'd love everyone's feedback and will do my best to implement any suggestions.
Cool product! Love how simple it is.
When I think about myself using it as a writer, my first thought is that it requires readers to enter their email addresses. In that case, it sort of competes with my email subscription form. That leads to an important question:
Does RemindToRead give me access to the email addresses of people who sign up for reminders on my articles? If not, it's hard to justify using it, because maintaining a list of subscribers is absurdly valuable as a writer.
Is this something you've considered?
Thanks for taking a look Courtland!
The email addresses are all saved for the writer themselves. Once you make a form, you can export/transfer all the email addresses.
Nice! I think that's huge.