Publishers Begin Pulling Advertising From Flipboard

Shortly after Flipboard announced its biggest partnership to date — full integration with The New York Times — news emerged that two prominent Conde Nast titles, The New Yorker and Wired, would no longer serve optimized versions of their online content through the app. Both magazines will also cease delivering advertising on the platform. The news was first reported by AdAge's Nat Ives.

At present, 15 different publications sell advertising for display on Flipboard.

History

The New Yorker and Wired became official content partners of Flipboard in spring 2011, and began advertising through the app later that fall.

The integration has allowed Flipboard users to view NewYorker.com and Wired.com content in seamless, magazine-like fashion: Articles are uncluttered, paginated and fast-loading, and photo galleries and videos can be blown up full-screen. Users need never leave the app, readjust their screens or navigate past a crowded right rail to read an article. Instead, full-page display ads — which were sold by publishers' respective sales teams, the revenue shared with Flipboard — are inserted between flips, mimicing the ad layouts of print magazines.

Beginning sometime in early to mid-July, Flipboard will stop displaying entire articles from The New Yorker and Wired. Instead, users will be shown excerpts, and will have to click through to read full articles on their respective websites. Content will take longer to load and will be corralled by banner ads; multimedia won't appear full-screen.

Publisher Concerns

Why the pull-back? Two sources whose titles run advertising on Flipboard told me that they stand to make more money by displaying their websites' banner ads on Flipboard instead of the full-page ad units that Flipboard currently permits them to sell (and of which Flipboard takes a revenue share). It has also been difficult for publishers to sell Flipboard ads against their own magazine apps and other digital properties, one of the sources added.

"It's like giving all of your content away," the same source observed. "It becomes one more thing for salespeople to sell and it doesn't make sense to split revenue with outside partners, when you could concentrate on your own iPad app and website instead."

There's also a concern that optimizing for Flipboard will cannibalize publishers' existing online and tablet readership. As one executive told Ives, "What people want out of a magazine is exactly what [Flipboard is] delivering. So if people feel like they're getting that already, even if it's not the same depth of content that would be in a print or monthly publication, then are they less likely to want to find it in the magazine itself?"

A spokesperson for The New Yorker would only say that optimizing and selling ads for Flipboard "doesn't fit with our strategy right now." The spokesperson added that The New Yorker is focused instead on monetizing its websites and tablets "in a big way," and that the publication "may come back" to Flipboard at a later date.

Flipboard Responds

Other Conde Nast titles will continue to optimize for and sell ads to display on Flipboard, including Bon Appetit, Glamour, Details, Golf Digest, W and Vanity Fair, a Conde Nast spokesperson confirmed.

In a phone interview, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said he was confident that The New Yorker and Wired would advertise through Flipboard again at a later date. "Ultimately the forces of capitalism will take over," he said. "We will be able to demonstrate that publications are doing a great job selling these kinds of ads, and advertisers are going to become more and more familiar with it."

"It's not an overnight thing; this is a new kind of ad unit," he added, noting that some publishers doubled the amount of advertising they sold on Flipboard this month compared to the month previous.

I asked McCue if, like The New York Times, magazine publishers would soon be able to offer optimized content solely to subscribers, thereby bolstering the value of its subscriptions. "It's another piece we didn't have available for The New Yorker or Wired at the time, but we ultimately we probably will make that capability available," he said.

Looking Ahead

When Flipboard cofounders Mike McCue and Evan Doll visited Mashable in New York last week, they described a vision for Flipboard as a portal, or browser, through which users would access all digital content in the future. They would be able to navigate seamlessly from personal news (i.e., updates from one's social networks) to news from professional content providers, whether they were on a smartphone, a desktop, Google TV or other connected device.

Publisher sign-on is critical to the fulfillment of that mission. If more publishers decide to revoke their optimized feeds and cease serving advertisements, users are likely to spend more time with individual news apps, and are less likely to turn to Flipboard for news in the first place. As such, Flipboard needs to seriously focus on bolstering ad revenue for its partners.

What exactly should Flipboard do? It's difficult to say. Perhaps the company needs to offer publishers more support, to help them come up with better creative and better differentiate Flipboard ads from the other digital ad units they're selling. Or perhaps Flipboard needs to think more deeply about the kinds of ads it can deliver, so it can truly differentiate its ads from those offered in publishers' tablet apps. (Flipboard is already doing this to an extent by allowing publishers to link their display ads to Flipboard feeds that aggregate content about the advertiser.) Giving publishers beyond The Times opportunities to bolster their subscriber base is also essential.

Those are, of course, only preliminary ideas. Any others?