Flipboard CEO, On The 15-Year-Old App: ‘We’re Just Getting Started’

At a time when AI-generated content is increasingly flooding the web and publishers are staring down the barrel of “Google Zero,” there’s at least one online media bright spot amid the grimness of it all. It’s a 15-year-old app that, for many news brands, continues to send steady referral traffic month after month: Flipboard, an app that’s managed against the odds to survive everything from the Facebook pivot-to-video era to the broader social traffic collapse of recent years.

Flipboard debuted back in 2010 — an eon ago in the span of the internet, 2010 being the same year Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s first tablet (Jobs himself dropped by the Flipboard office pre-launch and fawned over Flipboard’s design). Google+ launched the following year. The heyday of Buzzfeed’s listicles and quiz-driven journalism was still to come.

As for Flipboard, an app that was meant to make consuming content on the internet feel like reading a glossy magazine, it not only captured the imagination of early iPad users – it went on to outlast wave after wave of shifting digital trends.

“Over the past 15 years,” Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told me, “we’ve seen so much evolve, from competition that’s come and gone to the way people get their news. Our publishing partners in particular have seen their industry change under fickle algorithms, new platform owners and now AI.”

He continued: “We’ve always believed that the discovery of great stories is what moves us forward as a society — they help us learn, connect with each other and stay engaged as citizens.”

For context: Flipboard’s 15-year run puts it alongside only a handful of digital survivors — platforms like Twitter (launched in 2006), Instagram (2010), and LinkedIn (2003) — that have managed to stay relevant.

The app began with a simple idea. Because ads, among other things, had made the experience of navigating written content on the web so, shall we say, unfriendly to readers, Flipboard’s purpose was to try and repackage the web into a kind of beautiful, National Geographic-style digital magazine. Notwithstanding everything else that followed, it would come to stand as a sort of proof of concept that the web didn’t have to be an ad-clogged clickbait swamp.

For publishers today, the app also represents something much more existential.

Flipboard remains an online publishing ally at a moment of profound change for the open web. With Google’s AI Overviews cutting into search referrals, algorithmic shifts that keep pushing journalism further down the results page, and even major players like Penske Media suing Google over alleged anticompetitive behavior, traffic sources are under siege from all directions.

Flipboard, by contrast, still drives a meaningful amount of human-curated discovery and referral traffic.

Regarding the latter: This will obviously vary from one publisher to the next, but Flipboard itself has reported in the past that it commonly ranks among the top traffic referral sources for publishers — sometimes even the top five.

“We love being a part of how millions of people stay informed,” McCue told me.

In terms of the user experience, what Flipboard lacks in the minimalism of an app like X it makes up for in aesthetics and overall usability. The app, which is listed as an “Editor’s Choice” in the iOS App Store, is still built around the distinctive, magazine-like “turning” of each page of content, and content from publishers like Forbes, Variety, and The Daily Beast is featured prominently.

What makes Flipboard ever so slightly different from a typical newsreader/news aggregator is that, while a user can certainly follow publishers as well as other Flipboard users — there’s also the option to follow topics, hashtags, and themed-magazines.

As an aside: Flipboard definitely shines in the area of topics compared to some of its rivals.

In a test just now, for example, I added the “#ParamountSkydance” hashtag to the list of topics I’m following on my own Flipboard, given the firehouse of news that continues to emerge from CEO David Ellison’s media giant. When I opened up Apple News+ to do the same thing, though, all it gave me was the option to follow the “Paramount+” topic, nothing else, when I typed “Paramount” into the search bar.

Fifteen years after helping define the tablet era, meanwhile, Flipboard is still evolving.

The app’s next chapter blends curation with the decentralized web — integrating Mastodon, Bluesky, and Flipboard’s new Surf platform to connect stories, podcasts, and discussions across the fediverse. Surf, built alongside Flipboard, acts like a next-generation reader that pulls together content and conversation from multiple open networks into one place. Partnerships with publishers, creators, and independent journalists will also continue to be part of the mix.

“These 15 years have been a journey that’s made it even more clear that we’re just getting started,” McCue said.