Flipboard has acquired Graze, a Portland-based feed-building startup focused on monetizing the open social web, the company announced Wednesday. The deal marks another major investment by the news magazine software maker in a growing ecosystem where users, rather than a single company, control their own data and audience.
Graze builds tools that let creators design, customize, publish, and manage feeds for Bluesky, the decentralized social platform. These feeds are curated post streams that users can set as their home feed, pin for quick access, or bring into other apps built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, an open technical standard that allows different apps to share the same social network. Since launching 21 months ago, Graze says it has delivered more than 41 billion posts to roughly 12 million people.
How Graze Pays Feed Creators
The core idea behind Graze is that curators and communities can turn their expertise into income by building their own feeds. Rather than relying on the data-tracking model that follows individual users across the web, which open social web advocates call the “surveillance ecosystem,” Graze uses contextual advertising. A brand looking to reach game developers, for example, can buy a placement in a feed run by members of that community. Feed curators also choose which ads appear in their streams.
Advertising revenue is split 70/30, with the larger share going to the feed’s creator. Graze currently hosts more than 7,000 feeds, and about 60% of its traffic is monetized.
Why Flipboard Made the Deal
Flipboard had already been using Graze’s feed-building technology in its new app, Surf, which brought the two companies into closer collaboration. They discovered a shared vision for how the open social ecosystem could grow, along with overlapping work.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue praised the underlying adtech, noting that it “doesn’t have to surveil anybody, and it doesn’t have to violate people’s privacy.” He emphasized that the model spreads the economics beyond a single player, adding, “The ad revenue is being shared with the feed builder.”
Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney concluded that the project could advance faster with a partner that already had the infrastructure he needed, particularly Flipboard’s established relationships with advertisers.
What Changes After the Acquisition
Following the deal, Flipboard will continue using Graze’s technology and will let its own users build feeds. That capability will expand beyond the Bluesky app to everything running on the AT Protocol, including Flipboard’s own app.
McCue observed that many feed builders are creating communities on the open web without their members necessarily framing it that way. “They don’t think of it as, like, ‘I’m joining Bluesky’ or ‘I’m joining the social web, the open social web.’ They just think, ‘I’m joining The Tea because I care about women’s sports,'” he said, referencing a feed from a community on Surf called Bet on Her.
Flipboard is not disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition.
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Image: techcrunch.com
