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Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.
- Flipboard is launching a feature called "editorial franchises" that spotlights publishers' content around the mid-term elections, culture and world news.
- Over the past few months, publishers say Flipboard has started to work with them more around solving business problems like building sign-ups for newsletters and helping organize content into bigger packages.
- Publishers like PureWow are also teaming up with other publishers to create custom content for the app.
For some publishers, Flipboard is turning out to be the new Apple News. Or maybe even better.
Over the past couple of years, Flipboard has switched gears from being an aggregation hub that automatically pulls in publishers' content feeds to a curated news experience.
Not unlike Apple News (which has recently won more fans in the media world as it becomes a key source of digital traffic), Flipboard has an editorial team that publishers pitch, hoping to get their stories promoted prominently within the app.
But while Apple News mostly helps publisher get their content in front of more readers, Flipboard seems to have a vested interest in helping publishers grow their own businesses - i.e. make more money and nab more subscribers.
Indeed, as Flipboard ramps up its publisher relations,
- For one, Flipboard continues to drive significant traffic to publishers' websites that they are able to run ads and make money from, which is harder to work around within Apple News' so-called walled garden.
- Flipboard is also inclined to brainstorm with publishers in an effort to help address their business needs - such as developing new ways for publishers to capture email addresses for newsletter sign-ups and creating editorial packages around topics that they cover.
"Our experience with Flipboard has moved closer to the Apple News-style of human curation, especially from my team's involvement on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. said Rameez Tase, VP of audience development and insights at Axios.
"We definitely talk to someone at Flipboard several times a week."
Flipboard has a new feature that spotlights publishers' in-depth coverage
Flipboard is rolling out a feature dubbed "editorial franchises" Tuesday that takes big news topics like politics, culture and business and organizes into custom pages focused on themes like the mid-term elections or the new TV season.
The idea behind franchises is "to provide perspective on really important areas," Flipboard's co-founder and CEO Mike McCue told Business Insider.
"Instead of just going to a given publisher and seeing the latest stories and potentially missing some of the more insightful stuff that's buried past page one, Flipboard is trying to provide unique perspective by having trained journalists and editors package these stories up."
Five editorial franchises are launching Tuesday:
- "Vote 2018" pulls in content about the mid-term elections.
- "The Culturist" packages up entertainment content.
- "The Daily Edition: What's Happening Today" features the biggest world news of the day.
- "10 For Today: Feeding Curious Minds" highlights inspirational and is geared towards people who want to "be better in work, life and play."
- "The Insight" digs into top stories happening within the
advertising world.
The packages of content can be shared across social media and will be promoted within Samsung devices as part of partnership that Flipboard already has with the manufacturer.
PureWow and The Kitchn's Flipboard content
Franchises can also be sponsored by advertisers that promote their own content. Brands that crank out their own content on Flipboard can pay to promote and target them to specific audiences, though Flipboard has not sold any franchises yet, McCue said.
"Publishers have discovered Flipboard as a driver of high-quality traffic - that's something that we haven't yet gotten across to advertisers in a big way yet but is going to be something that we are going to really focus on," McCue said.
Publishers are getting in the habit of roping in Flipboard during the editorial process
Flipboard's editorial team combs through daily and weekly pitches from publishers' audience growth, social and distribution teams. From there, publishers tell Flipboard what they're working on to get it featured within the app. There are also quarterly and yearly pitches depending on events happening - like award shows or elections.
"We apply good old fashioned human judgement as well as mixing that with our personalization algorithms," McCue said. The personalization algorithm is a machine-based tool that serves articles to users based on what they've previously read or topics that they're interested in.
In some cases, Flipboard's editorial team can even help brainstorm headlines, Axios' Tase said.
"We can get feedback on headlines or likelihood of featuring because we're talking to actual people," he said. "For a topic in the weeds like 5G, you might not always get featured by an algorithm that's just doing some sort of popularity metric but their editors have a very good sense that it's going to be extremely relevant to their tech and business audience."
Axios' 5G coverage on Flipboard
Flipboard is one of Axios' top three sources of referral traffic and is currently exploring ways to get Flipboard users who regularly see Axios content to sign up for a newsletter.
"We're in continuing conversations with Flipboard on how we can make that happen via targeting and calls-to-action within the Flipboard platform to do so," Tase said.
Publishers are banding together for custom Flipboard content
Flipboard doesn't have the same amount of viral reach as Facebook or Twitter's newsfeeds but that's not necessarily a bad thing, said Mary D'Alessio, senior audience development strategist at Gallery Media Group, which houses PureWow and One37pm.
With Flipboard, PureWow has found ways to co-create content with other publishers to help stand out. PureWow has worked with The Kitchn and Well + Good to co-create digital magazines within Flipboard about cooking and self-care.
"It's a great way for us to curate our content to more niche categories, which is getting us to a more engaged audience with them," D'Alessio said. "With Flipboard, it's a very human process and feel like our content is getting out to the right people [and] is being vetted - they put thought into where they're placing our content."
PureWow's traffic from Flipboard "has doubled or more this year," she said. PureWow also works with Apple News and D'Alessio said that Flipboard plays up more social sharing than Apple News, which results in more engagement.
"We see more engagement where you're sharing and commenting," she said. "I think it's a different mindset [with] Apple News."