Flipboard Launches Publisher Interest Collectives, Expanding Advertiser Reach

Content aggregator Flipboard, which curates writing, audio and video from over 4,000 publishers, launched a new product Thursday morning, called Interest Collectives, in a bid to land larger direct media buys from brands and increase the revenue of participating publishers.

The program will launch with two topics—technology and travel—and a third, personal finance, will follow this summer. 

The collectives will let Flipboard bundle the off-platform audience reach of the participating publishers into its direct sales efforts to brands, extending its audience reach by an estimated 50 million monthly active users, according to Flipboard head of operations Annie Dennett. 

“While programmatic is great, many publishers want to diversify away from it,” Dennett said. “With Interest Collectives, we are bringing travel brands to travel publishers to reach their engaged audience. Meanwhile, publishers get higher CPMs and more relevant ads.”

The Interest Collectives bill themselves as a contextual advertising solution for member publishers, since they will use neither third-party cookies nor first-party data. Instead, they will serve contextually relevant ads—based on the content of a given article—with direct-sold inventory secured by Flipboard, and split the revenue 50-50 with publisher partners. 

The new product comes during a period of a shift in the programmatic advertising ecosystem, as the looming deprecation of third-party cookies renders contextual-advertising solutions critical. Meanwhile, declining CPMs on the open exchange have spurred publishers to seek strategies that plug them into direct demand.

For marketers, the collectives offer a bolt-on audience naturally segmented by interest, an enticing up-sell as relevant, scaled audiences grow more difficult to find due to signal loss.

Publishers have also experienced a collective throttling of traffic from search and social platforms, making sources of referral traffic and revenue like Flipboard—as well as aggregators like Pocket and SmartNews—more critical.

Higher CPMs, larger audiences, bigger ad budgets

At launch, the travel collective will include publishers Atlas Obscura, Explore, Fodor’s and Frommer’s, while 9to5Mac, Digital Trends and VentureBeat will make up the first technology collective. MoneyWise has signed on as the inaugural partner for the personal finance collective, and Flipboard is actively welcoming new publisher members.

The publishers, which have either small or nonexistent sales teams, joined the program with an eye toward replacing either remnant or unsold inventory with direct-sold demand.

“We view this program as a win-win because it allows us to continue growing engagement on Flipboard, while supplementing our direct sales efforts with new monetization opportunities,” said Pauline Frommer, co-president, Frommer Media, in a statement.

The collectives do not work as a programmatic guarantee, however. Instead, Flipboard will submit a bid on publishers’ available inventory alongside other sources of programmatic demand. 

But these direct bids—even in the absence of third-party cookies or first-party data—yield CPMs higher than anything these publishers could net on the open exchange, according to Scott Messer, the principal of Messer Media.

The program resembles a standard audience extension, a strategy offered by platforms including Facebook and Google, that increases the relevant scale these companies can offer to advertisers by bundling in third-party audiences, according to Messer. 

But audience extensions typically lack transparency, with advertisers unsure as to where their campaigns ultimately ran. With Interest Collectives, by working only with vetted publishers, Flipboard offers its brand partners curation as a service.

“They are curating a marketplace on behalf of their publishers and splitting the revenue with them,” Messer said. “Publishers will always welcome direct demand, but the scale needs to be there for it to be worth their while.”