“Read It Later was profitable from the first day it launched its original, paid iPhone app,” Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told paidContent. Before today’s change to free, it’s been the number-one paid news app on Android and Kindle Fire. “However, just because our company made money, it doesn’t mean we were making it in a way that fit our business best.” Weiner said “part of the reason we raised money last summer was because I recognized this and had a different model I wanted to go after”; he said he’ll share more details about the new business model this summer.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

The new app makes it easier to filter content by type and to tag and organize it. The interface looks more like Flipboard or Pulse, with images instead of just a list of articles.

Users who already have Read It Later Pro just have to update the app to get Pocket. Users of the free version have to download Pocket separately.

“Read It Later was profitable from the first day it launched its original, paid iPhone app,” Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told paidContent. Before today’s change to free, it’s been the number-one paid news app on Android and Kindle Fire. “However, just because our company made money, it doesn’t mean we were making it in a way that fit our business best.” Weiner said “part of the reason we raised money last summer was because I recognized this and had a different model I wanted to go after”; he said he’ll share more details about the new business model this summer.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

The new app makes it easier to filter content by type and to tag and organize it. The interface looks more like Flipboard or Pulse, with images instead of just a list of articles.

Users who already have Read It Later Pro just have to update the app to get Pocket. Users of the free version have to download Pocket separately.

See you later, Read It Later. The bookmarking app for web, Android, and iOS just changed its name to Pocket and launched redesigned versions of its apps.

Read It Later was originally designed to save articles on websites and social media sites to read later, hence the name. I’ve used the app for ages to save articles that I find at work, so I can read them in bed on my iPad or on my public transit ride home.

Despite its original intentions, Read It Later founder Nate Weiner discovered that 40 percent of the content saved with his service consists of videos, recipes, and webpages.

“We are embracing what our users are already doing with the app. People aren’t just saving articles and they don’t need a separate app for watch it later and buy it later,” Weiner told VentureBeat in an interview.

The company wanted to send a clear message that its service isn’t just for saving articles. The name Pocket is meant to convey that you can save anything for later, put it on your mobile device, and take in with you in your pocket. The “Read It Later” buttons in many social and content apps will be renamed “save to Pocket,” which to me just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

To go along with the name change, Read It Later is updating its apps with a different look. Instead of the black and yellow motif I’ve grown used to, Pocket has a beige theme with sea-foam green, teal, coral, and tangerine accents. And like nearly everything these days, the app adopts a Pinterest-like tile view option, which shows pictures from the content you save, if available.

Read It Later’s old interface was hardly problematic, but the new version is smooth and easy to use. You can favorite posts to find them later and bulk-archive posts, two new features. The company also did away with free and paid versions and is offering one free app for Android, iOS, and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

Read It Later and now Pocket, competes with Instapaper, a very similar content bookmarking service. Both Instapaper and Read It Later let you read saved content on your phone or tablet without an Internet connection. Apple’s Safari browser has the Reading List function, which also bookmarks articles and webpages to read later.

The service has gained significant traction, recording 200 million items saved as of March 2012. Weiner threw out the stat that five items were saved every second during our interview. And analytics from the company claim that it’s the second most popular share destination on content curation app Zite, beating out social networks Twitter and Facebook, and its competitor Instapaper.

Founded in 2007, San Francisco-based Read It Later has raised $2.5 million from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, and Google Ventures. The company has five employees.

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This holiday it was the Kindle Fire—12.5% of all devices registered on Christmas day and an impressive 17% of new users on the day after Christmas were from the new Amazon device. As you can see below, the Kindle Fire is still quite a bit smaller than our Android and iPhone/iPad audiences (it’s also the only platform with no free version yet).

While some have claimed that Android users aren’t interested in paid or premium apps, 45% of Read It Later’s Pro users during the holidays came from Android, and 19% came from the Kindle Fire.

Those are some substantial gains for a new tablet that came to market just a few months ago. Nate Weiner, CEO and founder of Read It Later, tells me “the Fire had a huge presence in our holiday numbers (almost on par with the iPad).” His findings are in keeping with early results from other developers, as my colleague Ryan Kim reported earlier.

It’s clear the Kindle Fire will be a presence in the tablet landscape. Only yesterday, I was saying that app developers with limited resources need to support two flavors of Android: Samsung’s version and Amazon’s version. The early data from Read It Later only reinforces that.

P.S.: If you are seeing similar growth spurt because of Kindle, do get in touch and share details so I can include you in the post as well.

Nate Weiner is one of those accidental entrepreneurs who make Silicon Valley somewhat of a magical place. Back in 2007, when he was working at a design shop in Minnesota, he was so busy he didn’t have time to read or see videos he came across the web. So he did what coders do: He wrote a little Firefox extension that allowed him to save and read (and watch) the content later when he got home. A few months later, Lifehacker discovered his extension and before he knew it, the brilliantly titled Read It Later was spreading across the web.

Fast-forward to today, and that little Firefox extension has become a phenomenon. It works on most major platforms, including Android (s goog) and iOS(s aapl), and more than 300 apps (such as Zite(s twx), Reeder, Twitter, Pulse and Flipboard) have built in support for Read It Later. (In July 2011, 250 apps supported Read It Later.) For instance, if you use Flipboard to read articles, a touch is enough to save it for later reading.

Read It Later, like many of its peers such as Instapaper, is part of a growing number of save-and-read-later apps that have benefitted from the emergence of the iPad. “People are time- and device-shifting their reading because of devices like iPad,” Weiner said. I told him I love Instapaper and so do many of my friends, and he laughed and acknowledged that Instapaper is well-known with the tech audience, and as a result, has a higher awareness. He then proceeded to tell me about the past 12 months for Read It Later.

A year to remember

During 2011, Read It later added more than a million new users and at present, has more than 4 million people registered. There are full-featured clients of the service for pretty much all platforms, and that has helped the company grow with the mainstream audience.

Here are some stats to give you a better understanding of Read It Later:

• There are four saves a second, or roughly 350,000 daily saves, or about 10.5 million saves every month.
• On the iPad, the Twitter app is the number one source of “saves” for Read It Later.
• It’s the  no. 1 paid news app on Android and on Kindle Fire.
• It’s a top 10 paid news app on the iPad.

Weiner says the company has started to see growth from Android and also from the Kindle Fire(s amzn). “Android now is roughly equal with downloads we get on iOS (iPhone and iPad),” he pointed out. The Fire, he says, has been less predictable as the “downloads on the Fire have been fluctuating wildly. Some days they are higher than Android and iOS; some days they are fairly minor. There are some very large spikes on specific days (Fire launch and Black Friday for example).”

When we talked, there wasn’t much data available about Fire sales, but Weiner was still a believer in Fire. “We have every expectation that the Fire is going to continue to grow,” he wrote to me in an email. “I’m expecting to see similar download numbers from the Fire that we get on iOS by the end of 2012.”

The cash conundrum

All this growth had forced Weiner to move from “me” to “we,” as he likes to describe it. Earlier this year, with growth and increasing competition especially from the likes of Apple and Evernote (which recently launched Evernote Clearly), Weiner faced a tough choice: continue to bootstrap or try to grow the company by getting outside capital from venture investors. After wrangling with the dilemma, in July 2011, he ended up taking $2.5 million in funding from the likes of Founder Collective, Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Thanks to this new cash infusion, he has grown the company to about eight people, has stopped working from his living room and has a tiny office in San Francisco. It has given him the cushion to try out new business models: something he’s currently mulling with this team and said he will make a decision about later.

I know I will be watching!