Flipboard Acquires CNN’s News Reader Zite

Flipboard has scooped up its rival news reader app Zite from CNN to strengthen its position in the competitive news reader market. The deal also includes a content and ad sales partnership with CNN. All CNN content will be available on Flipboard and the social reader app will create customized magazines for all of CNN’s shows. As part of the deal, both CNN and Flipboard will sell ads against CNN’s content going forward.

CNN is reporting  that the deal is “valued at $60 million,” but both the companies have not confirmed the amount. Zite, which CNN had acquired back in 2011, aimed to deliver a personalized set of news articles by analyzing each user’s interests, their social networks, and what they actually read. As a result of the acquisition, about 15-20 people from Zite will join Flipboard. However, Zite’s founder Mark Johnson will not join Flipboard as he plans to take some time off.

“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. 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”, posted Flipboard in a  company blog. Flipboard said that it will not continue to evolve Zite and will integrate its technology into the news reader service.

The newsreader app space has grown more competitive in recent months. Earlier this year, Facebook launched Paper, its own iPhone app promising curated and socially-refined news based on a user’s social networking profile. Also, In November last year, Google combined Google Current Apps and Play Magazines to launch Google Play Newstand for Android. Moreover, Yahoo rolled out an offbeat News Digest App for iOS that summarizes daily news and provides 2 updates a day. Another strong player in this space is Digg Reader that was launched after shutting Google Reder.

Flipboard has been working to add new users to its platform as well, and now it hit 100 million user milestone across all the mobile platforms and secured $50M in funding. It will be interesting to see how Flipboard will use the latest acquisition to garner more users to its platform.

 Source: Cnet

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