My 24 Hours Income Team Impact: Pinterest Acquires Instapaper; App to Continue On

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Pinterest Acquires Instapaper; App to Continue On

Pinterest has clicked the save button on Instapaper, announcing its acquisition of the application, which will continue to operate as a separate app.

Instapaper said in a blog post that its team will relocate from the New York offices of current owner Betaworks to Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters, adding that its Instaparser developer product will be shuttered Nov. 1.

The company said in its blog post:

Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since Betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our back end, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech and speed reading to the product.

All of these features and developments revolved around the core mission of Instapaper, which is allowing our users to discover, save and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper. Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale.

Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products. We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.

And a Pinterest spokesperson told Re/code:

It’s still early, but we’re exploring how the team’s expertise with dynamic content can be used to power some types of Rich Pins. In addition, Instapaper uses content signals to determine the most popular content and power features like Popular Sort, Instapaper Daily (the top article of the day) and Instapaper Weekly (a weekly digest of the top articles of the week), and this technology could further improve the way we index and recommend fresh and evergreen content on Pinterest.

Readers: What are your thoughts on Pinterest’s acquisition of Instapaper?