The powerful, easy-to-use news reader Pulse has been popular since it debuted on the iPad in the spring of 2010 and rapidly became one of the top 40 paid apps. Today, the company announces a huge milestone: it has served four billion stories total, with more than 10 million stories read every day. "Took 100 days to reach 10 million stories read," co-founder Akshay Kothari said in a concise email. "Now do over 10 million every day. Tripled in the last year."

Pulse is a visual, intuitive news reader that has been aggressive about expanding to new platforms and giving users new features. The app is available on iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire, Nook, and the web. Users select their preferred news sources, and Pulse pulls in images and text and arranges them in neat, readable rows. It also features video channels, local news feeds, and a read-it-later feature, as well as bite-sized, paid content from the Wall Street Journal.

More than 20 million people have opened Pulse and read at least one story, Kothari said.

Pulse has decided to launch a monthly analytics report called Pulse Insights in order to extract meaning from all this activity. "There are some really interesting nuggets of information about news reading today," Kothari said. Pulse released some of that information last year in an infographic that surveyed its first 11 million users. Users are most active between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., for example, and Wednesday is the app's most active day.

Future data points could include comparisons between iPad, iPhone, and Android users' habits, whether Americans are informing themselves about the upcoming election, or the average life cycle of a news story. To start, Pulse Insights will be posted on the company blog.

"Not only have Pulse users logged billions of stories, the number of stories read per person, per day, is increasing," the company said today. "These statistics contrast the gloomy outlook we hear so often about the news industry."

Pulse, also known as Alphonso Labs, has raised almost $10 million in venture capital funding and is up to 28 employees.