Flipboard Hits 20 Million Users, 3 Billion Flips Per Month
Oh hey, remember when Flipboard had 5 million users? That was the official figure at the end of last year. It was also the number that came out just as the social magazine app was launching on iPhone, after having previously been an iPad-only app.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flipboard's user curve has steepened with each screen it lands on. After speed improvements tripled daily usage in mid-2011, the company raised $50 million at a $200 million valuation that April, then opened the iPad-only app to iPhone in December — where phone flips quickly outpaced iPad flips 2:1.
The 20-million-user mark, up from 5 million at the end of 2011, is the payoff of that phone bet: the small screen turned a niche tablet magazine into a mass-market reader, and the milestone drew pickups from eight outlets including AllThingsD, CNET, The Verge and Mashable.
First-order effects
- Flipboard's addressable audience roughly quadrupled in under a year as the iPhone version carried growth the iPad alone could not sustain.
- Publishers and brands flowing into Flipboard's magazines now reach four times the readership they did when the app was iPad-only.
Second-order effects
- With phones generating the majority of flips, Flipboard's product and advertising roadmap shifts toward small-screen formats, pressuring any rival still anchored to tablet layouts.
- Scale metrics like monthly flips become the currency for Flipboard's next conversations with investors and media partners, following the pattern set by its 2011 raise.
Third-order effects
- If multi-device expansion keeps compounding, social reading apps consolidate attention that once went to publisher homepages, making aggregation platforms the front door for news consumption on mobile.
- Growth-by-new-platform becomes the template for content startups: launch on one premium device, prove engagement, then port to the larger installed base to reset the user curve.
The trend: Mobile content apps are scaling by sequential platform expansion, with each new device class resetting growth rather than cannibalizing it.