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Flipboard rolls out newsfeed personalization tools to save you from doomscrolling
Facebook is preparing to adjust its News Feed to de-emphasize political posts and current events, but news reader Flipboard is instead rolling out an update that puts users in control of their own feeds. The company announced this morning the launch of a new controller on the cover of its own main newsfeed, aka the “For You” feed, which now allows users to select new topics to follow and deselect those they no longer want to hear about. The feature, which Flipboard dubs “an antidote to doomscrolling,” allows users to customize their For You feed to deliver a wider selection of stories related to their various interests, instead of focusing their home page on breaking news and politics.
Given today’s current events — a pandemic that’s dragging on, climate change-induced wildfires and major storms, the fall of Afghanistan and other disasters — it’s no wonder why people want to take a break from the daily news. But for Flipboard, that trend could mean reduced use of its news-reading app, as well.
But while Flipboard notes that millions do use its app to keep up with breaking stories and politics, a majority of its user base also spends their time engaging with other topics — like travel, food, photography, fitness and parenting.
Image Credits: Flipboard
By introducing tools that allow users to customize their own feeds, the company believes users will not only see improved mental health, but will also spend a longer time in the Flipboard app. Already, this appears to be true, based on other recent changes Flipboard has made.
The company recently introduced topic personalization features, which allowed users to zero in on more niche interests — think, not just cooking but keto cooking; not just health, but mindfulness and sleep, for example. Users who customized their preferences spent between nine and 12 minutes per day reading stories about these topics, on average, Flipboard found.
With the launch of For You newsfeed controls, Flipboard wants to bring a similar level of customization and control to users’ own homepages.
The company said the feature also addresses the top request from users — they’ve been asking to have more control over the content selection in their For You feed.
To use the feature, you’ll look for the new filter toggles at the top of the main page. After tapping the icon, you’ll be launched into a window where you can tap and untap a range of topics. You can also use the search bar to discover other interests that may not be listed. When you’re finished customizing, you’ll just tap “Save” to exit back to your newly customized For You feed.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Flipboard hopes its customization capabilities will help it stand out from other news reading experiences — whether that’s browsing news inside social media feeds or even in dedicated news reading apps.
“This level of content control is unique to Flipboard; just think about how hard it is to adjust your feed on any other platform,” noted Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, when introducing the update. “A highly personalized feed empowers people to focus on the things that matter to them, without being distracted by doomscrolling, misinformation or browsing through other people’s lives. We build a platform that lets people take control of their media consumption rather than letting it control them,” he added.
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Augmented reality NFT platform Anima gets backing from Coinbase
Augmented reality and non-fungible tokens, need I say more? Yes? Oh, well NFTs have certainly had their moment in 2021, but the question of what they do or what can be done with them has certainly been getting voiced more frequently as the speculative gold rush begins to cool off and people start to think more about how digital goods can evolve in the future.
Anima, a small creative crypto startup built by the founders of photo/video app Ultravisual, which Flipboard acquired back in 2014, is looking to use AR to shift how NFT art and collectibles can be viewed and shared. Their latest venture is an effort to help artists bring their digital creations to a bigger digital stage and help find what the future of NFTs looks like in augmented reality.
The startup has put together a small $500K pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Lyle Owerko and Andrew Unger.
“As NFTs move away from being a more speculative market where it’s all about returns on your purchases, I think that’s healthy and it’s good for us specifically because we want to make things that are more approachable,” co-founder Alex Herrity says.
Their broader vision is finding ways for digital objects to interact with the real world, something that’s been a pretty top-of-mind concern for the AR world over the last few years, though augmented reality development has cooled more recently as creators have sunk into a wait-and-see attitude toward new releases from Apple and Facebook. Both the AR and NFT spaces are incredibly early, something Anima’s co-founders were quick to admit, but they think both spaces have matured enough that the gimmicks are out in the open.
“There’s a context shift that happens when you see AR as a vehicle to have a tactile relationship with something that you collected or that you see is a lifestyle accessory versus the common thing now where it’s a little bit more of an experiential gimmick,” co-founder Neil Voss tells TechCrunch.
The team has worked with a couple artists already as they’ve made early experiments in bringing digital art objects into AR and they’re launching a marketplace late next month based on ConsenSys’s Palm platform, where they hope to showcase more of their future partnerships.
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Flipboard expands its local coverage to more than 1,000 cities and towns
News aggregator Flipboard‘s local coverage is making what product lead Brian Gottesman described as a “quantum leap,” expanding from 60 topics (a.k.a. cities, towns and communities that you can follow) to more than 1,000.
While Flipboard has allowed users to follow stories focused on major cities like New York for years, it launched a broader initiative around local news at the beginning of last year. The company says it’s now bringing together news coverage in locations across the United States and Canada, including all 210 Designated Market Areas tracked by Nielsen.
This comes as local newspapers continue to struggle and shut down, creating what are known as news deserts. But Flipboard’s data quality analyst Marty Rose said that its local news sections don’t just rely on traditional newspapers — they can aggregate stories from travel blogs, publications aimed at diverse audiences, TV stations, regional/national publications that do stories of local interest and more.
“Our aggregation could create a local paper where in communities they don’t exist,” Gottesman added.
Flipboard is now tying these local topics to GPS locations, as well. Users will be asked to share their location with the app (Gottesman noted that to protect user privacy, Flipboard is only using “coarse precision” and doesn’t retain user location data), then presented with a list of nearby cities and local topics of interest that they can follow. This will allow them to keep up on everything from local political news to COVID-19 updates, weather forecasts and dining recommendations.
“This is such a key part of informing our users,” Gottesman said. “They need to know if there’s a natural disaster in their area … they need to know if there’s a new place to go and get vaccines. Their community is more important than ever.”
Conversely, Rose said that by building relationships with local news organizations, Flipboard could also “elevate” their coverage to non-local sections when it might be relevant to a broader audience.
Asked how publishers’ subscription strategies and paywalls might affect the stories that appear in these local topics, Rose acknowledged, “Some local publications do have paywalls. It’s entirely up to them, we have no problem with that whatsoever … We provide the headlines and if the user clicks through and they’re presented with some kind of paywall, it’s unfortunate for them, but it’s not really our call.”
At the same time, he said that local TV coverage isn’t paywalled, and that a growing number of local blogs and digital publications are relying on more of a donation or membership model: “I really hope that they stick around and we can push those a bit more.”
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Flipboard brings its ad-supported ‘Flipboard TV’ video service to all users
News app Flipboard is further expanding into video with Flipboard TV. The company’s curated video service first launched earlier this year as a Samsung exclusive, and is now making its way to all Flipboard users in the U.S. With today’s launch, the service will offer users access to video from hundreds of publishers, including global publishers, local news publishers and, now, select independent video producers, too.
Samsung Galaxy device owners will continue to have exclusive access to upgrade to the premium, ad-free version of Flipboard TV. For everyone else, the service will be ad-supported.
As of today’s expansion, Flipboard has also lined up a number of media partners that will provide their video feeds to Flipboard’s app. This list includes Complex Networks, Minute Media, A360 Media, Group Nine Media, The Recount, Bonnier Corp, Refinery29, Dow Jones, Hearst Magazines, Gannett, Vice Media Group and Penske Media Corporation, with brands such as Rolling Stone and Variety. Video from Euronews, Tribune Publishing and dozens of others will also be available through a new partnership with VideoElephant, the company says.
Image Credits: Flipboard
In addition, Flipboard is bringing independent publishers on board for the first time, like filmmaker Gene Nagata (aka Potato Jet) and video journalist Johnny Harris. These have been onboarded through Flipboard’s partnership with the influencer agency Spacestation Integrations. Other independents include Gary Vaynerchuk, AudPop’s filmmakers and Underknown, producer of video series such as “What If” and “How To Survive.”
Despite its expansion beyond traditional news publications, Flipboard says it’s making careful choices when it comes to its video lineup, in terms of quality.
“It’s not a free-for-all,” says Flipboard VP of Global Growth and Biz Dev, Claus Enevoldsen. “We have been very conscious about the whole ecosystem and making sure that what shows up for you in ‘For You’ is stuff that we know is not fake news. It’s trusted sources. That’s always been our MO, and we extend that to the video space, as well,” he explains.
Image Credits: Flipboard
The new video feeds will be available within a dedicated Video Tab in Flipboard’s Content Guide. The company says users will be able to more easily find videos to watch within the app due to improved discovery features and deeper integrations. In addition to its Content Guide, 20 top-level topics will now offer video-only feeds alongside articles, including travel, politics, local, lifestyle, sports, news and more. The videos will also be more prominent in users’ “For You” feeds, which is a mix of editorial and algorithmic curation.
Users will be able to add video-only feeds to their own magazines, too, if they prefer.
These videos, for the first time, will play natively within Flipboard. This helps to power Flipboard’s recommendation engine that directs you to related videos, the company says. This change also means users will be able to use additional video controls, like those that let them skip to the next video, for example.
Image Credits: Flipboard
The new video effort additionally ties into Flipboard’s recent expansions into local news that began at the start of 2020. As of this June, Flipboard’s local news coverage reached 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Today that number is 61. Now, Flipboard users will be able to follow their favorite local news outlets’ video content, as well, directly in Flipboard.
This presents what’s often a much cleaner experience than visiting the news publishers’ own app or website. Flipboard, meanwhile, offers an undisclosed revenue-share with its news partners, derived from the advertising that runs in their videos.
These ads play both as pre-rolls and mid-rolls, Flipboard says. This is the first time it’s run pre-roll ads on its platform — something that the company believes will help to address demand from publishers for high-quality, brand-safe digital video experiences on mobile.
At launch, Flipboard is selling the ad inventory for the videos. But the company says its intent is to allow publishers to sell the inventory themselves, further down the road. (If the publisher already has an ad sales team that can sell into this, however, they can continue.)
To promote their video content, publishers can also opt to use Flipboard’s recently launched Storyboards feature which, instead of being algorithmic feeds are static collections of content they want to highlight.
“Today’s launch builds on the publisher ecosystem we’ve been fostering for almost a decade, our foundational vision for content discovery, as well as our recent work around Flipboard TV,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s co-founder and CEO, about the launch. “The new native video player opens up new opportunities for new user experiences, partnerships and monetization. I expect us to partner with more creators and independent producers in the near future.”
The new features are rolling out today within the Flipboard app in the U.S.
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Flipboard rolls out Storyboards as a new way to highlight content
Flipboard is giving news publishers and other curators on the platform a new way to highlight content through a format called Storyboards.
Until now, Flipboard has largely focused on its Smart Magazines, which are ongoing collections that mix human and algorithmic curation, allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up-to-date on a given topic.
Storyboards, on the other hand, are more of a one-time collection of articles, videos, podcasts, tweets and other media. Content-wise, they may not be that different from an “everything you need to know about X” roundup article, but they give publishers an easy and visually stylish way to put those roundups together.
Publishers have already been beta testing it. For example, TheGrio created a Storyboard collecting the latest coverage of George Floyd’s death and the resulting protests, while National Geographic curated a package of new and old stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. And TechCrunch tried it out by doing daily roundups of coverage coming out of last year’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told me this is something curators have been asking for, as a way to “structure their curation better and be able to do better storytelling.”
He also said that Storyboards could be a great way to highlight different products and make money with affiliate links, especially since “curated commerce is something that will probably play more and more of a significant role in our revenue.”
Vice President of Engineering Troy Brant gave me a quick tour of the product, showing me how a curator can create different sections in a Storyboard, tweak the look of those sections and populate them with different kinds of content.
These new Storyboards can be discovered in Flipboard based on the topics with which the curator tags them. They’re also shareable and embeddable via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and email.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Brant noted that Storyboards are “complementary” with Flipboard magazines, as magazines can include Storyboards and Storyboards can include magazines. He also said the company is developing “more product capabilities” to highlight the best curation, whether that takes the form of a Storyboard or magazine: “That’s actually a work in progress at the moment.”
And Storyboards come with detailed analytics about how many people are viewing them, liking them, commenting on them, flipping them and more.
All of this is part of a new tool in Flipboard called Curator Pro, which is now available to all verified users in English-speaking countries, with plans for a more global rollout soon. Brant added that Storyboards are just the “first step” for Curator Pro, with more magazine curation tools and analytics on the way as well.
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Flipboard expands into local news
Flipboard, the personalized news aggregation app used by 145 million users per month, is today launching a new feature aimed at bringing local news coverage to 23 cities across the U.S. and Canada, including major metros like New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, D.C., Boston, Dallas, Chicago and many others. The goal with the new offering is to give Flipboard users an easy way to catch up with local news, sports, dining, real estate, transportation and weather from a variety of sources, including local newspapers, local TV stations, radio stations, college news sites and even blogs.
Local media outlets have been one of the hardest-hit by the internet, but a Knight Foundation study from October found that people trust local news more than national news. They also think their local reporters are more caring and unbiased compared with their national counterparts. But until now, there hasn’t been an easy way for readers to follow all their local news in a given city or metro — you still have to visit the individual news publications and area blogs separately.
Flipboard initially tested the local news product with Toronto, and found it resulted in an almost 10% lift in engagement from those who ended up adding Toronto’s local news to their Flipboard interests versus those who didn’t.
At launch, Flipboard users will be able to find the 23 Local sections inside the Explore tab in the Flipboard app. Once added, they’ll then be able to browse their local news in Flipboard alongside the other content they’re interested in, across Flipboard’s wide variety of topics.
In addition, some local publications also organize their content based on local interests. For example, The Miami Herald today publishes 15 magazines to Flipboard on topics like The Miami Heat or even Cuba. The Chicago Sun-Times publishes 24 magazines, like Chicago Politics and Chicago Education. And The Mercury News has 37 magazines on topics like The San Francisco 49ers and the California Wildfires. When articles are added to their magazines, Flipboard’s topic engine classifies the content, then recommends it to people interested in related subjects.
For the local news initiative, Flipboard will also now recommend stories to local audiences, based on their IP address. However, Flipboard says it doesn’t track a user’s precise location — the IP address gives it a rough idea of who to suggest these local news topics to. Flipboard’s advertisers don’t care about precise location, either. They target based on user interests, like travel. Now they’ll be able to add a city metro region as an “interest” they can consider when targeting ads.
In the longer term, Flipboard sees the addition of local news and information as a jumping-off point that could allow for further partnerships in the future. For example, Flipboard could partner with ticket sellers or event platforms like Ticketmaster and Eventbrite to connect readers to tickets for local events, or to Airbnb for opportunities related to travel.
But one thing it won’t do is try to compete with Facebook as a place for local community members to interact, as they do today in local Facebook Groups. Instead, Flipboard’s Local news product is only about connecting users to their interests.
“We applaud Flipboard’s thoughtful efforts to elevate local news to its users and are delighted that two of our largest metros, the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, will be part of this inaugural initiative,” said Jessica Gilbert, senior director of Product and Experience at McClatchy, in a statement about the launch. “We’re excited that our high impact local journalism, including investigative, opinion, sports and ‘news you can use’ will be surfaced and look forward to continuing to collaborate with Flipboard on spotlighting local journalism,” she added.
The new initiative requires that local publishers participate by publishing their content onto Flipboard. To do so, they have to first create an account, then use the Flipboard bookmarklet to start curating content into the platform. To automate submissions, they can instead submit their RSS feed to Flipboard. From then on, their content will automatically be analyzed and indexed by Flipboard’s AI.
Flipboard plans to expand the list of local metros to smaller cities and even smaller boroughs or communities over time. In the case of the latter, this could involve rounding up more local bloggers and curators, rather than only relying on the wider metro region’s bigger newspapers. This is an area where Flipboard could be useful, as it’s capable of ingesting all sorts of content — including things like Twitter feeds, RSS feeds and blogs. For instance, the local section could be augmented with the Twitter feed from the local high school sports team or college newspaper.
Local news is still an area tech companies are looking to solve. Digital news company Patch now uses a combination of humans and software to write its local news. And both Google and Facebook have made investments in local news, despite having been complicit in harming local news in the first place.
For participating publishers, being available on Flipboard will give them a different way to engage with and expand their audience, rather than relying on other traditional advertising and marketing opportunities, including social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, and digital ads. There’s no cost for publishers to participate on Flipboard. But for now, that means it only indexes free content — for paywalled content, users are sent to the website instead, where they either get a certain number of free articles per month or can log in as a subscriber.
At launch, the 23 metros regions covered include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington, D.C.
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Flipboard opens up to more publishers by embracing the mobile web
Flipboard is changing the way it works with online publishers, thanks to two connected announcements. First, publishers no longer need to work directly with Flipboard in order to get their stories into the app. Instead, there’s a new self-serve signup option, allowing Flipboard to automatically pull in stories from publishers’ RSS feeds. To be clear, CEO Mike McCue said… Read More
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Videos are getting a bigger role on Flipboard
Flipboard is following the launch of its “smart magazines” by boosting the role of videos. It’s not that videos were totally absent from the news app before this, but they usually showed up as an accompaniment to articles — not exactly prominent placement when compared to the beautiful treatment that Flipboard would often give photos. Now, CEO Mike McCue said videos… Read More
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Flipboard revamps its approach personalized news with new “Smart Magazines”
Flipboard is releasing a big update today, which introduces “Smart Magazines” — a new way for people to find news stories and other content tied to their interests. CEO Mike McCue said the big goal behind this update was to answer the question, “How can we modernize the notion of magazines?” Like many print magazines, these Smart Magazines are meant help you dive… Read More
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Flipboard Launches A New Targeted Ads Product Based On Its Interest Graph
Flipboard today is opening up some better targeting to its advertising partners in the form of the advertising based on the interest graphs it has built for its users. Here’s an example: an advertiser that chooses to advertise with coffee topics may also have their ads shown with craft beer topics. The reason behind that, Flipboard head of advertising products Dave Huynh said, is… Read More
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