Flipboard announced its acquisition of Graze, a Portland-based startup that developed tools for building and managing custom feeds on Bluesky. Through the deal, Flipboard is betting on a different model for monetizing open social networks, based on contextual advertising and revenue sharing with feed creators rather than relying on tracking users across the web.
Graze enables feed creators to build, edit, publish, and manage custom post streams. Users can set these feeds as their home interface, pin them for quick access, or embed them in other applications that operate over the AT Protocol, an open technical standard that enables multiple applications to share the same social network.
According to the company, since its launch 21 months ago, Graze has delivered more than 41 billion posts to approximately 12 million people. Its platform currently includes more than 7,000 feeds, while roughly 60% of its visits are being monetized.
A different advertising model
Graze relies on contextual advertising that targets the topic of the feed or the community managing it, rather than building a tracking profile of an individual user’s behavior across multiple sites. For example, a brand could target game developers by purchasing advertising space in a feed managed by members of that community. Feed creators can also choose which ads they accept for display.
Advertising revenue is split 70/30 between the feed creator and Graze, with the creator receiving the larger share. Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO, said the model does not require monitoring users or violating their privacy, and that it distributes economic value instead of concentrating it with a single entity.
What changes in practice?
Flipboard was already using Graze’s technology in its new Surf app, which led to broader collaboration between the two companies. According to the article, the companies discovered that they were working on similar parts of the same infrastructure, and that Graze could move faster by relying on Flipboard’s existing infrastructure and relationships with advertisers.
After the acquisition is completed, Flipboard will continue using Graze’s technology while enabling its users to build feeds. This will not be limited to the Bluesky app, but will extend to everything that operates over the AT Protocol, including the Flipboard app itself.
A small deal with open questions
Flipboard did not disclose the terms or value of the acquisition. Available information indicates that the deal is small: Graze raised only $1 million at the beginning of 2025, and its team consisted of two people. Therefore, the announcement does not indicate a significant financial scale as much as it illustrates Flipboard’s attempt to unify feed-building technology with an advertising model that distributes revenue to communities and creators.
The practical questions remain tied to how this model can be applied at a larger scale, and to the extent to which contextual advertising can fund feeds without returning to the tracking mechanisms criticized by advocates of the open social web. What is confirmed for now is that Flipboard will integrate Graze’s technology into its ecosystem, expanding its scope from Bluesky to other AT applications.