Flipboard Brings Its Mobile Magazines To The Web Flipboard started on mobile devices, but the magazine app is moving to the web today with the launch of a new site. Its 75 million registered users will be getting access to its superior formatting and curation features for articles, photos and video on their desktops and laptops. But why the web? The company has already added 25 million registered users since launching a do-it-yourself mobile magazine creation tool in late March, for a total of around 75 million people to date. If it stayed mobile-only instead of becoming mobile-first — a decision many tech entrepreneurs are considering these days — it would probably continue to grow just fine. The answer is that the web is still core to how many users behave, particularly around features like easy-access share buttons for distributing articles across social networks and email. If you click on a Flipboard link that you see from a friend on Twitter, for example, you’ll now open a dynamic web page instead of being directed to the mobile app like you would had been before (ex: here’s our TechCrunch Weekly magazine of our top stories, updated every Friday). Browsing is also at least as easy as the touch interface offered on Flipboard’s iOS and Android native apps, courtesy of work from Charles Ying and others working on the HTML5 experience for the company. You can use your mouse, magic mouse or trackpad to quickly flip left or right through the stories. If you have a clickwheel, each click turns a page. A navigation scrub bar at the bottom of each magazine lets you quickly browse through the compilation. “It doesn’t matter if the web site cannibalizes native app traffic,” founder Mike McCue says about the web version. “We don’t care where the user comes from. We’re trying to curate awesome content on any device, as optimized as possible.” Beyond distribution and a better user experience, being web friendly fits into the Flipboard business plan. The company has begun selling full-page ads mixed in with regular content like what you might see in a high-end print magazine. Larger professional publishers, including the owners of this publication, currently have revenue-sharing agreements in place for their own magazines, but the company plans to expand that to other content and curation creators. Around two million magazines have been created since the March launch of the DIY tool, and many of the top ones are bit.ly/164aOOE tcrn.ch/164aPSI Source: TechCrunch
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:14:26 +0000
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