Flipboard on the web: an interesting development
I am watching with interest the development of magazine-format social network aggregator app Flipboard, an elegant visual metaphor that evokes a magazine but that is becoming a genuine multiplatform reading system that now has some 75 million users, is available for smartphones as well as the device it was originally designed for, the tablet. From now on, Flipboard magazines can be read on any web browser a move that gives it a completely different dimension.
Originally, Flipboard’s roles were clearly divided: users were readers, and application managers offered, like editors, a series of channels allowing each user to put together their own magazine. Last March, the company launched a system that allows any user to install a button on their navigator making them the editor of their own magazine, a step that has sparked the appearance of more than two million magazines created by users and that includes people like me (who offered readers the possibility to flip through, magazine style, all the technology news that has caught my attention each day), corporate publishing, special events magazines, or thematic archives generated by work groups. Anybody who can manage content can, with absolute ease, become an editor or curator of said content, and present it in an attractive format.
Use levels are hard to gauge, but the magazine I put together, Technology readings, reached at one point around 1,600 readers, and is currently at around 300, compared to the more than 2,300 who follow my daily round up technology news on Pinterest.
The latter indicator seems more reliable, because while Flipboard updates its figures regularly to reflect the number of active users, Pinterest can maintain a high number of inactive users who simply haven’t bothered to unsubscribe. We will have a better idea of this now that Flipboard is no longer a tool limited solely to smartphones and tablets, and spreads to the web.
Flipboard’s real challenge is to establish friendly relations with the providers of the content it aggregates. Flipboard’s relationship with these content creators is complex: on the one hand, they provide a platform to reach a bigger audience and to share with those it reaches percentage deals on the income generated by advertising in the magazines it publishes. The company has not hidden its interest in developing other revenue sources such as micropayments, profit sharing, or subscriptions.
On the other hand, it is also holding on to a substantial part of said revenue, and publishing under a different banner and with a different design the material generated by the original creators, accompanying it with its own advertising, a practice that has led some to block the use of their images in magazines produced by the company. If you try to aggregate a Flipboard magazine to sites such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, or Wired, you will find that you can, but you will also see that the accompanying illustration stays put, with the result that the news is incorporated without it, and the result is obviously less attractive. If a sufficient number of the big publishers deny Flipboard access to their material, there will be a significant falloff in interest in these kinds of magazines.
Some people see Flipboard as a a huge iceberg waiting out there for the media. The number of sources that will try to retain control over their content will be key to the viability of Flipboard: if more publishers decide not to play ball, then the appeal of the platform will diminish significantly.
In the final analysis, what Flipboard is doing, even on a modest scale, is much worse than what Google News is doing, and that Google’s strategy has prompted the media in many countries to start a war that is still ongoing. At stake is where we consume content and the user experience. Making things difficult for users, and trying to get them to do things in a certain way—either you read my news on my page, or you don’t read anything—does not seem the best course of action.
