Reports have suggested that micro-blogging giant Twitter is looking into purchasing digital magazine app Flipboard, in a deal thought to be in the vicinity of around $1b. The deal, initially, doesn't seem like a great fit - Flipboard is a content aggregation site that co-ordinates material from across the web into a magazine-style format based on subjects or personal preference. Twitter's focus, on the other hand, is on 140-character missives which wouldn't directly translate into Flipboard's format in a direct way. What's more, the $1b price tag seems pretty steep for Twitter, a company that's facing mounting pressure over its slowing user growth and revenue-generating options. So why would Twitter be considering buying up Flipboard? There are a couple of possibilities that would make sense.
A Question of Growth
While Twitter has faced questions over its ability to expand its user-base, Flipboard has also had its share of growing pains. While the company saw positive user growth from launch, those numbers have since levelled out. Flipboard did have a deal in place with Samsung, where the app came pre-installed on all Samsung smart phones, but that deal ended earlier this year. And while the company does have an $800m valuation, it's definitely facing a problem with slowing user growth - Flipboard reported 100 million 'activated' users last year and has not updated that figure since.
Given Flipboard's growth concerns, partnering with Twitter could make some sense, as they would then be able to gain wider exposure to Twitter's 302 million monthly active users. There's also the data partnership behind that - utilising the insights gained from the content shared across Twitter's expanding social graph, Flipboard could update and improve their offering to build more tailored, intuitive curation solutions, catering to more specific user needs. Twitter, too, would be able to help Flipboard improve and expand their advertising options to better monetize their offerings and enhance revenue potential.
On Twitter's side, it would provide the social giant with an expansion of their offerings that could help better position them as the leading news source. Partnering with a Flipboard's magazine-style offering could help expand the value of Twitter's news-breaking nature, but there's also one other significant reason why Twitter might be looking to make a deal with Flipboard - the threat of Facebook's latest news offering.
Instant News
After much speculation, Facebook recently announced the launch of 'Instant Articles', an offering that will see Facebook partnering with media companies in order to publish their content direct to Facebook, as opposed to linking back to their own sites. The new process comes with a significant level of risk for publishers - while Facebook's terms and ad share rates are generous now, there's concerns that if publishers become reliant on Facebook for distribution and audience reach, that they'll be at the mercy of the platform when it inevitably alters the deal and angles it more in its own favour.
Twitter, too, has its own concerns about this new process. Where Facebook has become the home for personal interactions and for staying up to date with information from family and friends, Twitter is known as the network where news breaks. When a passenger plane crashed into the Hudson River, the story was first revealed via tweet. When the Boston Bombings occurred, many turned to Twitter for the latest updates. Twitter has become synonymous with breaking news and is the go-to source for many in finding timely information. But Facebook's Instant Articles could change that - having publishers post direct to Facebook could see more people remaining within the walls of Facebook for longer, and having publishers post direct to the platform could mean more people come to rely on Facebook as their primary news provider.
Over time, Twitter has become a partner platform for many news organisations and publishers. If Facebook becomes more familiar, if news organisations start building more beneficial partnerships with Facebook instead, that's another front on which Twitter is losing out to The Social Network. Twitter's recent deal with Google to show real-time tweets in search results underlines the importance of immediacy to their overall plans - if Twitter loses its position as the go-to resource for news, it loses significantly. Partnering with Flipboard may enable them to maintain a hold on this aspect by offering an alternative product and utilising Flipboard's existing partnerships with publishers. This would mean Twitter could institute their own 'instant articles' type format and link to longer form content directly from tweets. While they may struggle to offer as favourable terms as Facebook has in their initial roll-out, there's a lot of potential benefit to a combined Twitter-Flipboard offering from this perspective.
New Leadership?
The other aspect that some have reported as a possible lure for Twitter is the opportunity to acquire the skills of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. A former Twitter board member, McCue vacated his Twitter board seat due to increasing competition between Twitter and Flipboard, which he co-founded in 2010. McCue has a solid reputation throughout the Silicon Valley, particularly in terms of his product nous, and some have suggested that, amidst mounting pressure on Twitter's current CEO Dick Costolo, that McCue may be seen as an heir apparent, as someone who could help solve Twitter's problems whilst also building a stronger company through integration. This aspect is particularly difficult to speculate on, but forms an interesting subplot nonetheless. Would the acquisition of Flipboard and McCue be worth the high price tag? Only those within the organisation could know for sure.
User Experience
So what would a combined Twitter/Flipboard offering look like? Honestly, the combination of real-time tweets, and tweet data, with a magazine-style element is intriguing. The data, in particular, stands out as something that may provide an enhanced value to the Flipboard offering, with better predictive curation and automated content detection offerings which may help brands find more relevant content faster - an important element in our evermore content-focussed communications landscape. We've seen curation offerings cropping up from various sources in the last year - Klout added a curation element, Hootsuite has something similar, LinkedIn's Elevate is along the same lines. Many of the current offerings utilise Twitter share data to improve the accuracy of their suggestions, the content being shown is based on what's being shared in your network or networks related to your interests. But what if Twitter restricted access to that data? What if Twitter made it so the only way you could access similar curation information was to use Flipboard? It's all speculation at this point, but there are options. There are possibilities within a Twitter/Flipboard partnership.