Flipboard acquires Graze, the feed builder working to monetize the open social web

Flipboard , the news magazine software company that has more recently invested in the open social web — the umbrella term for social platforms that let users, not one company, control their own data and audience — is making another big bet on that ecosystem. The company on Wednesday announced it’s acquiring the Portland-based feed-building startup Graze , which has been working to monetize the open social web by allowing feed creators to support themselves via ads.

Graze today offers tools to build, customize, publish, and manage Bluesky feeds, which are curated post streams that users can set as their home feed, pin for quick access, or pull into other apps built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol (an open technical standard that lets different apps share the same social network). Since launching 21 months ago, Graze has sent over 41 billion posts to some 12 million people, the company says .

The idea is that curators and communities can build their own feeds to turn their expertise into income. Most importantly, the ads are not based on the data-tracking model that relies on following individual users across the web, and which open social web supporters call the “surveillance ecosystem.” Instead, they’re contextual. That is, if a brand wants to target ads to game developers, it can buy a placement in a feed run by members of that community. What’s more, the feed’s curator can pick and choose which ads they want to run.

Meanwhile, the ad revenue is split 70/30 with Graze, with the majority of the revenue going to the feed’s creator. At present, Graze has north of 7,000 feeds on its platform, and around 60% of its traffic is monetized.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue praised the adtech involved, saying that “it doesn’t have to surveil anybody, and it doesn’t have to violate people’s privacy…so that’s a really fantastic vision. And the key thing is that all the economics aren’t just going to one player.”

The ad revenue,” he added, “is being shared with the feed builder.”

Flipboard had been using Graze’s feed-building technology in its new app, Surf, which led to the two companies working more closely together. It turned out that the outfits shared a vision for how the open social ecosystem could grow, but they were also duplicating each other’s work.

Graze co-founder and CEO Devin Gaffney realized things could move faster with a partner that already had the infrastructure he needed — in this case, Flipboard’s existing relationships with advertisers.