Newsletter
This morning the folks over at Re/code are reporting that Twitter may be looking to purchase one of mobiles most popular news reader apps, Flipboard. The social media company is reportedly looking to purchase the news reader for over $1 billion. All of that ‘over $1 billion’ would be used to purchase Flipboard stock, in order to make the acquisition.
This is apparently nothing new to Twitter, according to Re/code the company has been discussing purchasing Flipboard since the beginning of this year. But, purchasing Flipboard is not all Twitter’s idea, they have been facing increasing pressure from the boys over on Wall Street to grow their audience and innovate. Because of this, Twitter could be under the impression that purchasing Flipboard, will give them access to a great and experienced team that will assist them in doing just that. Twitter purchasing Flipboard would also give them access to the great Mike McCue, who is the founder of Flipboard, as well as many other companies, making him an entrepreneurial genius and an invaluable resource.
Twitter isn’t the only company having growth problems though, Flipboard is right there with them. That’s due to what seems to be both companies user bases seeming to level out. Which is an obvious problem that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, in order to stay afloat. Because of this, both companies almost need each other to survive. If purchased, both Twitter and Flipboard could direct users to each other’s services and possibly even do more to become more integrated with each other. But there is a problem with this that needs to be pointed out, which is that Twitter and Flipboard probably have a substantial amount of overlapping users. Despite this, if both companies were to work together they could at the very least give each other a small boost in users.
The two companies would also be able to exchange skills to help each other grow and become more profitable. For instance, Flipboard just began rolling out their video ads to users about a year ago and they are still in experimental stages. They also rolled out ‘promoted items’, another ad type that is still experimental. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have gotten promoted item ads down and would be able to share information on that with Flipboard. With talks about the acquisition supposedly currently stalled, there is no telling when this deal could go through.