Flipboard 3.0, the latest version of the personally curated digital magazine app, is optimised for mobile and includes new features including a Daily Edition morning news round up.
Users are consuming online news differently: often scrolling through Twitter feeds to catch the headlines during the commute and perhaps saving longer feature articles to read when winding-down before bed. Flipboard is adapting its offering to take account of such trends – and the fact that 70% of the app’s access is via mobile.
The update offers greater personalisation and a smoother interface – which includes allowing users to swipe to go back, and topic tags to make articles more discoverable.
Social is central to the app, and Flipboard co-founder and chief executive Mike McCue says social media is now a primary way to discover content.
The app has 100 million users worldwide and picks up 250,000 new readers per day, according to the company. Of these, 40% are in the US and about 10% in the UK. There’s also a Chinese edition of Flipboard, which works with local social networks Renren and Sina Weibo – as Facebook and Twitter are censored.
“We really believe in the power of great journalism to move the world forward,” McCue explains, “and so what we wanted to do with flipboard is create a platform for really high quality content to thrive.”
The 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur founded Flipboard in 2010 with former iPhone engineer Evan Doll. Its main competitors include Newsstand by Google and Facebook’s Paper, yet Flipboard was one of the first apps on Apple’s iPad tablet and blended together algorithmic and human curation to create a highly visual personal magazine, and partnered with social media companies so that the content was shareable.
The start-up is growing fast, with a team of 160 that includes developers and curators, and has more than 8,000 publishers on board, partnering with organisations such as the Guardian, New York Times and CNN; and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
There are now 10m curated magazines available on the platform, compiled together by individual users and publishers.
Mobile
Earlier this year, Flipboard acquired the smart competing mobile news streaming site Zite, which has the technology to analyse millions of articles and then provide the reader with article recommendations.
This is significant and in its latest iteration, Flipboard for mobile can be more personalised. The new tab bar means that you can navigate between your Flipboard quickly, including your profile, search and notifications. It’s also more optimised, with handy icons so that a user can share on social media networks more quickly and also browse social media networks, such as Instagram, in magazine format. This allows fast access shared links to articles that can sometimes be lost among other tweets on the Twitter app.
“When you flip past the cover you’re immediately in the content,” McCue explains in a demonstration to the Guardian. “It’s like a stack of cards. Each card has a story on it. And so when you want to read a story you tap on it opens up.”
Daily edition
Flipboard 3.0’s new feature, the Daily Edition, which appears on your personalised dashboard in the app, aims to cater for our changing reading habits. It’s compiled and ready to open at 7am on your device. There’s a beginning, middle and an end. You can flip through the highly visual magazine of 12 pages rounding up the day’s news. It’s a quick read including top stories from news, business, sports and culture and one in-depth feature. It also makes use of multimedia and there’s a daily track at the back which can play in the background while you continue reading. And at the back there’s a gif of the day. It’s fun and a good way to get people flicking until the end.
Users
As an individual user, it’s possible to curate your own magazines, find magazines, blogs, and follow other curators, reading the magazines that they have put together. You can also add a Flipboard widget on your personal blog.
The biggest Flipboard 3.0 development is that you can now personalise your dashboard further by searching from more than 34,000 topics. This is great if you are into niche subjects: if you are into photography and want to learn more about time-lapse, its easy to search and archive all those articles and blogs that you may never usually come across into a magazine and read whenever you want. It’s true, you can do this on archiving apps such as Pocket or Delicious too, but it’s not as user-friendly and articles can sometimes get buried.
Publishers
This also applies to large publishers and large partnering organisations who can better atomise and package each article or a series, and keep track of the data by checking the analytics dashboard. For example, the Guardian has curated NSA files for flipboard that you can easily share, includes 97 articles and has had more than 5m flips.
Flipboard also provides an opportunity for journalism on apps to make money, with a full-page ad taking 10 times more revenue than a traditional banner. The reality is, users may not download apps for every single media organisation to read the odd article. But with Flipboard, even small publishers can be endorsed, and McCue insists that his app does not endanger publishers or social media sites and that a user is just accessing all the different content in one place through a different browser.
For publishers, the attraction of partnering with Flipboard is the brand awareness they may gain. Yet at the same time, publishers want readers to come back to their apps, read other stories on their website and want them to register. Some publishers are providing a lot of quality content for readers to consume for free, and not necessarily gaining loyalty in return.
McCue wanted to harness the timeless principles of print and the sensation of flicking through pages with Flipboard and fuse this with the opportunities brought by touchscreens. This seems to have chimed well for newspapers who are trying to be more “social”.
In 2015, Flipboard aims to bring together more users, publishers, more content and more multimedia. Sceptics may argue that Flipboard is essentially republishing and repackaging other people’s work, yet McCue says that it’s endorsing and about discovering, especially at a time when fewer people are actually accessing the news from traditional website front pages.
