Mozilla is out to make the web a better place for everyone. Making its first acquisition towards reaching that goal, the company today made its acquisition of Pocket public. The acquisition brings a fitting conclusion to a very close relationship Pocket and Mozilla have always shared.
Announcing the acquisition, the companies said:
We are excited to announce that the Mozilla Corporation has completed the acquisition of Read It Later, Inc. the developers of Pocket.
In case you haven’t had occasion to use Pocket during the course of your online forays, it provided a plugin for Mozilla’s Firefox browser that allowed users to save content that they wanted to read at a later date. The best part about saving content via Pocket was that the article was saved without the accompanying ads and formatting.
Following the acquisition, Pocket will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation and will also become part of its open source project. As far as the user experience is concerned, you can expect Pocket to continue as it is. THe only major change that could occur would be that the service could become more uniform across different platforms.
Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. As our first strategic acquisition, Pocket contributes to our strategy by growing our mobile presence and providing people everywhere with powerful tools to discover and access high quality web content, on their terms, independent of platform or content silo.
Meanwhile, Pocket will continue with its monetization drive that saw the company start presenting sponsored content to readers who might be interested in it and Mozilla has no plans to interfere with it.
Pocket’s content recommendation system is one of the more expansive ones and at the last count, had over 10 million unique monthly active users on iOS, Androidand the Web. The platform has seen over 3 billion pieces of content saved to date and is also available on other platforms like Safari and Chrome.
