Flipboard has acquired Graze, a feed-building startup focused on helping creators and communities monetize content across the open social web.
The deal strengthens Flipboard’s growing presence in decentralized social platforms and comes as the company continues investing in alternatives to traditional, centralized social networks.
Graze, based in Portland, provides tools that allow users to create, customize, publish and manage social feeds, particularly across Bluesky and its AT Protocol ecosystem.
Building a business around social feeds
Graze allows creators and communities to curate specialized feeds that users can follow as their primary content stream, pin for quick access or use through other applications built on the AT Protocol.
Since launching roughly 21 months ago, Graze says its platform has delivered more than 41 billion posts to approximately 12 million people.
The company currently supports more than 7,000 feeds, with around 60% of its traffic monetized.
A different approach to social media advertising
One of Graze’s main ideas is to create an advertising model that does not depend on tracking individual users across the internet.
Instead, its advertising approach is contextual.
For example, a company targeting game developers could place an advertisement within a feed focused on game development. Feed creators can also decide which advertisements appear within their communities.
Graze shares advertising revenue with feed creators using a 70/30 split, with the larger portion going to the creator.
The model aims to give communities and independent feed builders a direct way to earn money from the audiences they have built.
Flipboard’s open-web strategy
Flipboard has increasingly focused on the open social web, including platforms such as Bluesky and other decentralized social networks where users and communities have greater control over their data and audiences.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue has argued that advertising on the open social web does not necessarily require invasive user tracking. Instead, revenue can be distributed among the different participants building and maintaining the ecosystem.
The acquisition of Graze gives Flipboard direct access to technology that supports this vision.
Graze technology already powers Surf
The two companies were already working together before the acquisition.
Flipboard had integrated Graze’s feed-building technology into Surf, its application designed for browsing content across the open social web.
That partnership eventually brought the companies closer together and highlighted how closely their strategies aligned.
According to Flipboard, both companies were pursuing similar goals and were increasingly duplicating parts of each other’s work.
What the acquisition means
The acquisition could accelerate the development of creator-driven monetization for decentralized social platforms.
Rather than concentrating advertising revenue within a single social network, Graze’s model gives individual feed creators and communities a direct share of advertising income.
As the open social web continues to evolve, the combination of Flipboard’s audience and Graze’s feed technology could help establish new ways for creators to build sustainable businesses outside traditional social media platforms.
