• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2020

Flipboard on Tuesday rolled out a native paid-content program introduced last year in beta that gives creators the opportunity to promote stories, expand audience development, and support affiliate and marketing efforts.

“Think of it as a self-service buy model,” said Andrew Zalk, who is spearheading the paid content program for publishers. “They can pay as they go, and if it doesn’t work for them they can pause or cancel it at any time.”

About 30 partners participated in the beta. Now it’s time to extend the offer to others. The program began as a revenue-share partnership, but has since moved to pricing byCPC and CPM. The revenue share was not incentivizing publishers to work together with Flipboard.

Publishers want to be less dependent on Google and Facebook, so they are looking to diversity their referral traffic sources. Search Marketing Daily has heard this sentiment from many publishers and advertisers during the past few years.

“All publishers want to grow and increase revenue from their audience, but they’re all at different stages,” Zalk said.

The program, which is only available on the mobile app today, consists of five uniquely priced programs: Audience Development, Branded Content Distribution, Affiliate, Newsletters, and Marketing.

Organic content gets pushed from publishers either manually or through a RSS feed to Flipboard. It is fed into the algorithm and served to mobile users. There are tens of thousands of topics that readers can follow. The pre-selected topics are human and algorithmically curated.

Paid content is pushed out through the same format, only featured as promoted to reach a broader audience.

The “core” data collected about users is relevant to interest topics, Zalk said. “It’s driven by user behavior,” he said. “We have 44 core interests like exercise, green living and style that publishers can bundle together and target.”

There is also data based on audience and demographic data through a third-party provider.