Flipboard Buys Graze to Expand Open Social Media

Online news digital magazine Flipboard has taken a new step to expand the reach of open social media. The company has officially announced the acquisition of Portland-based feed technology startup Graze.

Graze allows users to create and publish customised feeds of posts from Bluesky, the decentralised social network, and various platforms built on its open technology infrastructure, the AT Protocol. Following the acquisition, content and feed creators on these open networks will gain new opportunities to monetise their work through advertising.

Privacy-Friendly Advertising and Revenue Sharing

Rather than tracking users’ personal information like conventional social-media platforms, Graze uses fully contextual, topic-based advertising. For example, an advertisement aimed at game developers can be displayed only within feeds related to the relevant community.

Over the past 21 months, the platform has delivered more than 41 billion posts to approximately 12 million users. Graze currently has more than 7,000 active feeds, with 60 percent of them generating regular revenue.

The most significant aspect of the model is its revenue-sharing arrangement: feed creators receive 70 percent of advertising revenue, while the remaining 30 percent goes to the platform for operating costs.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue praised the model, saying that sharing advertising revenue with content creators without compromising users’ privacy represents an attractive vision for the future of social media.

Acquisition and Future Expansion

Flipboard had already been using Graze’s feed-creation technology in its new app, Surf. With the two companies pursuing similar goals and developing overlapping technologies, they ultimately decided to join forces.

Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney said that by leveraging Flipboard’s advertiser network and large-scale infrastructure, they would now be able to accelerate their work significantly.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, Graze reportedly began operations with just two employees and $1 million in initial funding.

Through the acquisition, ordinary users across Bluesky and other platforms powered by the AT Protocol, as well as Flipboard’s own apps, will be able to create customised feeds more easily and gain opportunities to earn revenue from them.

//DBTech/BMT/OR//