about  /   archives  /   contact  /   subscribe  /   twitter    
Share this entry
Make this entry better

What are we missing? Is there a key link we skipped, or a part of the story we got wrong?

Let us know — we’re counting on you to help Encyclo get better.

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Key links:
Primary website:
flipboard.com
Primary Twitter:
@flipboard

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Flipboard is a news-reading application for the iPad and iPhone that presents stories and links from around the web in a visually appealing, magazine-like fashion.

It has proven to be very popular, often listed among the most downloaded free apps in Apple’s App Store. In May 2011, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said the app’s users were generating more than 8 million “flips” — something approximating pageviews — per day, and as of April 2013, Flipboard reported 6 billion monthly “flips” and 53 million total users. Its iPhone app grew even faster, generating 1 million downloads in its first week in December 2011. The company was valued at $800 million in 2013.

Apple named Flipboard its iPad App of the Year for 2010. The app has been positioned as a more user-friendly iteration of aggregation tools like RSS readers and Twitter apps.

Flipboard plans to generate revenue by selling advertising, aiming at ad rates similar to those of print, which would be far ahead of most online advertising rates. It launched its first advertising program in July 2011 through a partnership with Conde Nast. Its advertising program has drawn criticism from some of its partner publications, leading Conde Nast’s Wired and The New Yorker to pull out of it in June 2012. It announced plans to add video ads in fall 2014.

In December 2010, Flipboard announced Flipboard Pages, a new format for presenting articles through custom-designed layouts. Flipboard Pages debuted with a number of partners in the traditional publishing industries, including The Washington Post Magazine, SB Nation, Lonely Planet, and the San Francisco Chronicle. About 50 publishers, including The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, had joined the program through October 2011. The New York Times announced in 2012 it would expand its paywall to include access via Flipboard. Flipboard also began partnering with Google in 2012 to include Google+ and YouTube streams. In November 2012, it added a books section through Apple’s iBookstore.

Flipboard launched a new version that allows users to edit and share their own magazines from Flipboard content.

Flipboard expanded to include audio content in May 2012, using material from NPR, PRI, and SoundCloud; it has also launched video channels with curated content from YouTube. It also has versions in China, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, and Spain.

While Flipboard was perhaps the most popular among iPad apps in its category, a number of new competitors launched in early 2011 to try to improve the aggregated, social news-reading experience. Zite was a Canadian startup that promotes its ability to learn from users’ actions; Flipboard bought it from CNN in 2014 with plans to fold Zite’s technology into Flipboard’s product. News.me is a Twitter-driven aggregator originated in The New York Times‘ R&D Lab, then moved to the link-shortening service Bit.ly. Trove is a Graham Holdings Co. product that focuses on creating customized “channels” of news about particular topics.

Flipboard has received criticism for sending insufficient traffic to the sites it aggregates. In 2013, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall announced his site had withdrawn from Flipboard and similar aggregation services, saying they were bad for publishers. Flipboard’s McCue responded that Flipboard delivers substantial ad revenue to its large publishers and plans to new sales channels to bring that revenue to smaller publishers as well.

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
June 26, 2019 / Laura Hazard Owen
SmartNews has shown it can drive traffic. Can it drive subscriptions too? — In recent months, publishers may have been noticing an influx of traffic from a not-usual suspect: SmartNews, the news app that was founded in Japan in 2012 and has been operating in the U.S. since 2014. The company is P...
Oct. 22, 2018 / Josh Schwartz
What happens when Facebook goes down? People read the news — What would the world look like without Facebook? At Chartbeat, we got a glimpse into that on August 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the web changed in an instant. What did peop...
Sept. 27, 2016 / Nicholas Quah
Hot Pod: Will the next wave of audio advertising make podcasts sound like (yuck) commercial radio? — Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue eighty-nine, published September 27, 2016. Panoply opens a London office. The Slate Group’s audio arm announced yesterday that it was expanding into th...
Sept. 17, 2015 / Laura Hazard Owen
iOS 9: How news organizations are updating their apps for Apple’s new operating system — Apple opened up iOS 9 to everyone for download on Wednesday. Most of the attention is going to ad blocking (and, yep, the No. 1 paid app in the App Store today is an ad blocker), but publishers are also updating their ap...
July 2, 2015 / Ken Doctor
Newsonomics: On end games and end times — Platish or perish? With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter. We’ve read so many obits for news me...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Joshua Benton. Main text last updated: August 14, 2014.
Make this entry better
How could this entry improve? What's missing, unclear, or wrong?
Name (optional)
Email (optional)
Los Angeles Times logo

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper owned by Tribune Publishing. It is the United States’ fourth-largest daily newspaper and among the top five newspaper websites in the country. The Times was owned by the Otis/Chandler family from its founding in 1881 until 2007. The family-owned Times Mirror Co. merged with the Tribune Co….

Put Encyclo on your site
Embed this Encyclo entry in your blog or webpage by copying this code into your HTML:

Encyclo is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
Some rights reserved. Copyright information »