Flipboard is already one of the most popular news reader apps out there, but now, with the purchase of its rival Zite, it could become the biggest news app ever. Flipboard killed two birds with one stone on Wednesday when it acquired Zite: Flipboard eliminated a competitor and amassed a whole new group of followers.
Zite is well known as the news app used by CNN to help increase mobile traffic to its site from users who wouldn't normally look to CNN for their news. Although Zite has been beneficial to CNN, the news organization decided to sell the popular news reader app to Flipboard in exchange for an advertising partnership and guarantees that CNN news would appear on the new and improved Flipboard app.
Flipboard had it's own motivations for acquiring Zite. Although Flipboard and Zite share the common goal of aggregating interesting and unique content for their respective users, the two companies go about it very differently. Flipboard offers news that is categorized and very likely to appear on social media and in mainstream media. Zite's goal has always been to bring stories to its users that they won't find anywhere else. Zite is also more personalized and really creates a unique experience for all of its users, while Flipboard has more of a stock collection of news organizations it shows each user.
"We acquired Zite from CNN to address something we've heard from a lot of you: although you can already read thousands of sources from over 20 regions on Flipboard, you want easier and better ways to discover content about the things that matter to you," Flipboard wrote in a blog post. "Adding Zite's expertise in personalization and recommendations to Flipboard's product experience and powerful curator community will create an unparalleled personal magazine for our millions of readers."
In addition to gaining a lot of insights into what users want, the purchase of Zite has also eliminated one new reader app competitor from the picture. Flipboard will gradually phase out Zite and migrate all of that app's users to Flipboard.
"We're going to integrate the technology into Flipboard in the coming months," Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said during a press call Wednesday. "We do not plan to continue to evolve Zite, we think we should focus on a single product."
After the purchase was announced, Zite co-founder and CTO Mike Klaas told the app's users that "the Zite app is not going to be around forever," adding that it might have six months left to live before it becomes a part of Flipboard.
"Our goal is to get the things that are great about Zite into Flipboard before shutting it down," he wrote in a blog post. "We will also build a way for you to transition your data from Zite into Flipboard."
The addition of all of Zite's users will undoubtedly help Flipboard ascend even higher in the news reader app world, but it will still face tough competition. Facebook's new app Paper is still in its infancy and has a lot of untapped potential. As Paper becomes more customizable and unique, it could pull users away from Flipboard, simply because of the added element of Facebook integration.
