Flipboard debuts personalized Smart Magazines, which aggregate stories on various topics, available today
for topics from Leica cameras to venture capital Sean Captain / Fast Company : Flipboard's Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself Derrick Rossignol / Engadget : Flipboard streamlines your feed with ‘Smart Magazines’ Usman / iPhone in Canada Blog : Flipboard Gets Major Revamp, Introduces New “Smart Magazines” Tweets: Ken Doctor / @kdoctor : Amazing stat: Flipboard downloads now 97% on smartphones. Remember the tablet era that would change EVERYTHING? http://www.fastcompany.com/... Mike McCue / @mmccue : @CaseyNewton @MarcBodnick and why should people have to figure out who exactly to follow? And then see every tweet no matter the subject? Mike McCue / @mmccue : @CaseyNewton @MarcBodnick the net is that this is not a zero sum game. Not everyone wants to get their content the way you do. David Pierce / @pierce : I had kinda forgotten about Flipboard, but I really like the quieter, more personal space its new app provides https://www.wired.com/... Chris Ciaccia / @chris_ciaccia : Isn't this just apple news? http://twitter.com/... Rafat Ali / @rafat : I am still rooting for @flipboard, mostly because of its stubborn persistence. http://www.fastcompany.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Re: the new Flipboard, I wrote about why “smart news” apps always fail in 2014 http://www.theverge.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Smart Magazines arrive after a rough stretch for Flipboard: in late 2015 the company was bleeding executives while ad rates fell and sales talks with Twitter, Yahoo, and Apple went nowhere, and months earlier Apple had moved onto its turf by launching its own Flipboard-style News app with publisher-friendly revenue terms.
CEO Mike McCue has since repositioned around premium advertising and differentiation from rivals like Nuzzel and Apple News, backed by JPMorgan's $50M investment — and his framing of the new product is telling: people shouldn't have to figure out who exactly to follow.
First-order effects
- Users no longer need to curate by hand: Smart Magazines assemble topic feeds automatically, from Leica cameras to venture capital, shifting Flipboard from a follow-graph product to an interest-graph one.
- The move puts Flipboard in direct feature competition with Apple News and Nuzzel, both of which already aggregate or surface stories without requiring users to pick sources.
Second-order effects
- Publishers gain another algorithmic distribution surface alongside Apple News and Facebook-hosted news, reinforcing the pressure on direct traffic that content owners have been resisting since the hosted-news debate began.
- McCue's stated bet on high-end ads means the new format must prove it can deliver brand-safe, premium inventory at rates above the falling programmatic averages that hurt Flipboard in 2015.
Third-order effects
- If topic-based aggregation wins over manual curation, news apps converge on the same structure — platforms assembling feeds from publisher content — leaving publishers to compete on differentiated content rather than distribution, the argument made when Facebook began hosting news.
- The discoverability problem Smart Magazines attack is durable enough that a later generation of read-later and curation apps built businesses around improving it, suggesting aggregation interfaces will keep being rebuilt rather than solved once.
The trend: News consumption is shifting from user-curated follow graphs to platform-assembled interest feeds, with Flipboard, Apple, and Facebook all converging on the same aggregation model.