Flipboard is acquiring Graze, a two-person startup that lets creators, publishers and communities build and monetize custom social feeds without writing code. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
A custom feed is a stream of posts organized around a particular subject. Someone could build one covering women’s basketball, horror movies or streaming technology, choose which sources it follows and establish rules for which posts appear first.
Graze says its technology has delivered more than 41 billion posts to approximately 12 million people during its first 21 months. It supports more than 7,000 feeds, primarily through Bluesky, with around 60% of its traffic currently generating advertising revenue.
Flipboard was already using Graze inside Surf, an app that brings together websites, podcasts, YouTube channels and posts from social networks including Bluesky and Mastodon. The acquisition puts the technology for building feeds and the product for viewing them inside the same company.
YouTube, TikTok and Meta decide what appears in their feeds, which advertisers can reach the audience and how the resulting revenue is divided. Creators supply the content, but the platform programs the experience.
Graze lets the person building the feed make more of those decisions.
Flipboard is betting that a feed doesn’t have to belong entirely to a giant social platform. It can become a business operated by the person who understands the audience.
Flipboard Is Turning the Feed Into a Product
TV networks choose shows for an audience. Magazines choose stories. Streaming services decide which movies and series appear on their home screens.
Social platforms do the same job through a feed.
Each user receives a nonstop schedule assembled from creators, publishers, advertisers and recommended posts. The platform decides what appears, how often it appears and who receives it.
Creators have limited control over those decisions. They can make the programming and attract followers, but an algorithm change can reduce their reach without warning or negotiation.
Graze allows someone outside the platform to build the feed.
A curator chooses the subject, selects the sources and establishes rules for organizing the posts. People can follow that feed through services using the same open technology instead of relying on one company’s main recommendation system.
The feed becomes the channel. The curator decides what belongs on it.
Graze Pays the People Who Build the Feed
Graze sells contextual advertising inside its feeds.
Contextual advertising targets the subject rather than tracking an individual’s behavior across the internet. A company trying to reach basketball fans could advertise inside a women’s basketball feed without building a detailed profile of every person reading it.
The feed builder can decide which advertisers are appropriate for the audience. Graze handles the advertising technology and delivery.
Under the current model, the feed builder receives 70% of the advertising revenue. Graze keeps 30%.
YouTube pays creators for videos that generate advertising. TikTok sells advertising inside a feed controlled by TikTok. Graze can pay the person who organizes the entire stream of content.
That person doesn’t have to create every post.
A journalist, publisher, expert or community operator can build a feed from several sources. The product is the feed they assemble: useful content from several sources, filtered and organized for a specific audience.
It applies the job of a network programmer or magazine editor to a social feed.
Flipboard Is Combining the Builder With the Viewer App
Surf gives people a place to find and view these feeds.
The app gathers content from Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, websites, RSS feeds, podcasts and YouTube. A user can follow a subject without every article, video or post originating from the same social network.
These services communicate through open technical standards. In simple terms, one company doesn’t need to host every account or piece of content for different apps to display them.
Graze provides the tools for building and ranking a feed. Surf provides the interface where people can browse and follow it. Flipboard brings existing relationships with publishers and advertisers.
The combined product works like this:
- A curator chooses a subject and sources
- Graze organizes the content into a feed
- Surf helps people find and follow it
- Flipboard sells advertising
- The curator receives most of the advertising revenue
Closed platforms handle all five jobs themselves. They control participation, recommendations, audience data, advertising and payments.
Flipboard is giving the curator more control over the middle of that process. The curator can decide what the feed recommends and which advertising appears alongside it.
Flipboard still controls Surf, maintains Graze and operates the advertising system. It isn’t removing the platform. It is giving publishers and creators a larger role inside it.
TV Companies Depend on Feeds They Don’t Control
Viewers often encounter a show, movie or sporting event before opening the service carrying it.
They see a clip on TikTok, a review on YouTube, a player interview on Instagram, a podcast discussion or a recommendation shared by someone they follow.
The streaming service owns the finished program. The social platform often controls the conversation that convinces someone to watch it.
That gives social platforms leverage over companies spending billions of dollars on programming. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram decide which clips spread, which creators receive exposure and which communities form around a title.
The control layer is increasingly becoming the media business. Owning the show creates demand. Controlling discovery influences where that demand goes and who gets paid along the way.
Custom feeds give media companies another option.
A sports league could build a feed combining official highlights, player accounts, independent reporting, podcasts, schedules and fan discussions.
A streaming service could build feeds around horror, documentaries, children’s programming or an individual franchise.
A creator company could combine its videos with interviews, outside coverage and community posts published across several platforms.
These feeds could keep the conversation organized between releases and direct viewers toward games, episodes or subscriptions.
Flipboard hasn’t announced tools connecting a custom feed directly to subscription sales or full-length video playback. Surf also remains far smaller than YouTube, TikTok or Instagram.
The opportunity is still clear. Media companies may eventually be able to program part of the discovery experience themselves instead of handing the entire job to another platform.
A Curator Can Operate Like a Small Network
The TV business has always depended on someone choosing what airs, when it airs and who it is intended to reach.
Social platforms automated that job. Their algorithms use viewing and behavioral data to assemble a different schedule for every person.
Graze doesn’t remove the algorithm. It lets the curator establish its purpose.
A feed can prioritize trusted experts, local sources, recent posts or content selected for a particular community. Users know what the feed covers and whose judgment is shaping it.
That can become a small media business.
The operator doesn’t need to produce every piece of content or build a standalone app. The job is choosing and organizing material people want to follow.
The curator sets the subject and standards. Creators and publishers supply the posts. Advertising pays for access to the audience.
YouTube’s Stations experiment also turns creator catalogs into programmed channels. YouTube still controls the larger platform, sells the advertising and decides which stations viewers find.
Graze is testing whether the person assembling a feed can control more of the programming and earn more directly from the audience it attracts.
Contextual Advertising Still Has to Pay Enough
Graze’s advertising model is much smaller than the behavioral advertising businesses operated by Meta, Google and TikTok.
Behavioral advertising uses information about an individual’s activity to target and measure campaigns. Contextual advertising relies mainly on the subject surrounding the ad.
An advertiser may know that a feed reaches women’s basketball fans without receiving a detailed profile of every person following it.
That protects more user privacy and can make an advertisement fit naturally with the community. It gives advertisers less information for targeting, measurement and automated optimization.
Allowing curators to reject advertisers creates another tradeoff.
A feed operator can protect the community from irrelevant or conflicting sponsors. Every rejection also reduces the amount of advertising Flipboard can sell.
Giving curators 70% of the revenue sounds attractive. The total revenue still needs to be large enough to pay for the time required to build, maintain and promote the feed.
Graze has shown it can deliver billions of posts. Neither Graze nor Flipboard has disclosed advertising revenue, average curator earnings or how many feeds generate meaningful income.
The technology works. The business still has to prove that feed builders can make a living from it.
Owning a Feed Doesn’t Mean Anyone Will Find It
Open technology reduces dependence on a single platform. It doesn’t automatically deliver an audience.
YouTube, TikTok and Instagram remain powerful because billions of people already use them. Their recommendation systems can introduce an unknown account to viewers who never searched for it.
A Graze curator has more control after somebody follows the feed. Flipboard still has to help people discover it.
Surf will consequently make its own decisions about which feeds appear in search results, recommendations and featured sections. Popular placement inside Surf could determine which feeds attract followers and advertising.
That gives Flipboard some of the same power it wants to distribute.
A curator may control the content inside the feed while still depending on Surf, Bluesky or another app to make it visible. The feed can move between compatible services, but each service controls how easily its users find it.
Flipboard must create enough discovery to make independent feeds useful without building another recommendation system nobody outside the company can understand.
The Streaming Wars Take
Flipboard is acquiring the tools to let creators, publishers and community operators build, organize and monetize their own feeds.
YouTube, TikTok and Meta combine content, recommendations, audience data and advertising inside platforms they control. Creators can build large audiences on those services without controlling how their work is distributed or how the surrounding feed operates.
Graze gives curators more say over what appears, how posts are organized and which advertisers reach the audience. Flipboard provides the viewing app, advertising relationships and technology needed to make those feeds available.
The business remains early. Flipboard hasn’t disclosed its advertising revenue, curator earnings or a clear path from social discovery to full-length video viewing.
Streaming services, sports leagues and rights owners already rely on social feeds to build demand for programming. Custom feeds could give them a way to organize the clips, reporting, creators and fan conversations surrounding that programming without relying entirely on one platform’s algorithm.
Flipboard isn’t trying to beat TikTok by operating one enormous feed. It is betting that thousands of smaller feeds, run by people who understand their audiences, can become businesses of their own.
The next media network may not own every program it recommends. It may build the feed that tells viewers what to watch.
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