Flipboard Acquires Graze to Monetize Bluesky and the Open Social Web

TL;DR

• Flipboard has acquired Graze, the startup behind popular custom feed-building tools for Bluesky and the AT Protocol, to accelerate its push into the open social web.
• Graze’s privacy-friendly advertising technology and creator monetization tools will be integrated into Flipboard and its Surf app, giving publishers and curators new ways to earn revenue without surveillance-based ads.
• The deal signals a major step toward a monetized, sustainable decentralized social ecosystem, with Flipboard positioning itself as a key bridge between Bluesky, ActivityPub, and the broader fediverse.

What Actually Happened

Flipboard, the longtime news curation and social magazine platform, has acquired Graze, the New York-based startup best known for making it easy to build and monetize custom feeds on Bluesky.

The acquisition, announced this week, brings Graze’s entire team and technology in-house at Flipboard. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Graze will continue to operate its existing feed creation tools in the near term while its core technology is integrated into Flipboard’s ecosystem, which includes its flagship Flipboard app and its newer Surf browser for the open social web.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said the move is about building the business model for the open social web from the ground up, rather than retrofitting the ad-tech of the closed social era.

A Perfect Fit for Flipboard’s Open Social Strategy

The acquisition is not a pivot for Flipboard — it’s an acceleration. Since 2023, Flipboard has been one of the most aggressive adopters of open protocols, federating with ActivityPub to connect with Mastodon and Threads, and more recently integrating deeply with Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

Flipboard’s Surf app, launched as a custom feed browser for the open web, already lets users create and follow topical feeds across decentralized networks. Graze was solving a nearly identical problem on the Bluesky side, but with a powerful no-code approach.

Graze allows anyone to create sophisticated custom feeds for Bluesky without writing code, using natural language prompts and visual filters. Instead of relying on a single algorithmic For You feed, users can subscribe to human-curated feeds like “Science Writers,” “Indie Game Devs,” or “Black Sky” — a model that has become one of Bluesky’s defining features and now powers more than 70,000 live feeds.

By acquiring Graze, Flipboard instantly becomes the dominant player in feed curation infrastructure for the AT Protocol.

Beyond Curation: The Monetization Play

Curation was only half of Graze’s story. The startup had been quietly building what it calls a privacy-friendly monetization layer for the open social web — and that is what Flipboard really bought.

Unlike traditional social platforms that rely on tracking users across the web to target ads, Graze’s ad technology is built around the context of the feed itself. Advertisers can sponsor a specific feed — for example, a photography feed or a climate news feed — rather than targeting a specific user profile. The ad is relevant because of what the feed is about, not who is scrolling it.

For creators and feed curators, Graze also offers built-in monetization tools including feed sponsorships, tipping, and premium subscriptions. This gives the people who do the valuable work of filtering and curating the open web a direct path to getting paid — something that has been largely missing from decentralized social networks until now.

Flipboard plans to integrate these tools directly into its ecosystem. Publishers who flip stories into Flipboard Magazines, curators who build Surf feeds, and developers who build on the AT Protocol will all be able to monetize their feeds through Graze’s system.

What It Means for Bluesky and the AT Protocol

For Bluesky, which recently surpassed 40 million users, the deal solves one of its biggest open questions: how will anyone make money here?

Bluesky has intentionally avoided replicating the surveillance advertising model of legacy social networks, but that has left creators and developers without a clear business model. Graze’s approach offers a potential answer — a way to fund great curation and original content without compromising on privacy or decentralization.

The acquisition also validates the AT Protocol as more than just an experimental alternative to ActivityPub. With Flipboard now invested in both protocols, it is uniquely positioned to build bridges between the two worlds. McCue has long argued that the future of social is not one protocol winning, but many interoperable networks coexisting.

By owning Graze, Flipboard can help make custom feeds portable, discoverable, and profitable no matter which open protocol they run on.

What’s Next

In the short term, Flipboard says Graze’s existing tools will remain available and free for Bluesky users to create and manage feeds. Over the coming months, the team will focus on integrating Graze’s ad server and monetization features into Flipboard and Surf, with a broader rollout for publishers and independent curators expected later this year.

For the open social web, the message is clear. The era of just building decentralized alternatives is over. The next phase is about making them sustainable — and Flipboard just made a major bet that Graze is the company to do it.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.