
The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart - prostoalex
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/news-reader-apps/
======
walterbell
UBC's Zite (after sufficient training) was consistently excellent at surfacing
high-signal content from a variety of sources. It declined after acquisition
by CNN and has become nearly invisible after incorporation into Flipboard's
"Cover Stories". Now that Flipboard has turned off the backend which powered
the Zite app, the next best options are:

    
    
      - manually curate Twitter lists for reading in Flipboard
      - manually curate RSS feeds 
    

In the age of burgeoning AI and powerful clients, it is tragic that we have
such little investment in automated filtering where all data is private to the
endpoint and portable between devices. Or public sharing of training data for
news algorithms. Where is the GPL-equivalent for data at risk of being
orphaned?

We need standardized legal clauses for startup founding engineers to deter
"Orphan Software Works". E.g. source code is escrowed at the time of each
acquisition, and if the acquired technology disappears from the market because
all acquirers have closed or abandoned the product, it must be released to the
public as open-source, with or without patent grants or training data.

Code and learning from dead startups can fertilize research fields for future
crops, instead of disappearing into legal black holes.

~~~
doff
I didn't realize just how much I relied on Zite until it was gone. I tried to
launch it several times a day in the week after it was turned off.

If anything, Flipboard has taught me that the UI of flipping pages is best
left to physical magazines, where each page can have enough information
density to make it worthwhile. Maybe the flipboard flip action works better on
a tablet; but on a phone I can't bring myself to use it, no matter how much of
Zite's technology they fold in.

~~~
walterbell
Flipboard has sadly hidden the Zite per-article training options in "Up Arrow"
-> "Tuning Options" which is the last menu item under the Share menu. What was
one Zite click (up/downvote) is now Flipboard's click, swipe, click, click.

It brings you to a dialog which offers:

    
    
      More Like This
      Less Like This
      Mute Site
      Report Site
    

Gone is the Zite option to whitelist/subscribe to a site, which was the
equivalent of following an RSS feed. Tragic. At least medieval cathedral
builders would leave behind ruins to remind future generations of what was
attempted. Software just vanishes.

Note to News App Developers: read Claude Shannon on the role of surprise in
information theory. If your app shows the same articles being regurgitated in
every other app, there is no surprise, i.e. news or information. Zite excelled
at surprise.

~~~
kazinator
Flipboard is something people actually use?

I recognize the name as some crapware pre-installed on my Samsung phone.

~~~
walterbell
It's useful on tablets when combined with Twitter lists. Each list becomes a
Flipboard magazine, you can then flip through meta-pages with substantive link
previews, surrounded by tweets. This gives the benefit of Flipboard's UX with
Twitter's manually curated content. This use case is buried:

    
    
      Profile
      Following
      Accounts
      Service Name (e.g. Twitter)
      Your Lists
      List Name
    

Before it was turned off, Zite allowed their users to migrate their data
(topics, white/blacklist, votes) to Flipboard. For longtime Zite users, there
were thousands of data points. Sadly, that data has not resulted in a Zite-
like filter of Flipboard's content.

------
munificent
This is literally the worst chart I have ever seen in my life.

~~~
jrcii
W|hat|'s wr|ong w|i|th i|t?

------
3am_hackernews
Not to be a debbie downer, looking at this chart hurts my head. I am sure
there are many other ways to present this information in a __much __more
elegant and clean way.

~~~
m52go
Like Twitter's Labella, perhaps!

[http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/](http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/)

------
SandersAK
Even a cursory Google search will show this data is inaccurate. See circa
total raised. Here it says 1.7m but googling "circa investments" Angel list
shows several rounds and closer to 5m raised.

Makes the insights hard to believe.

------
phalgunr
I regularly use Pocket, and I think it'll keep growing in an age where you're
constantly being blasted with interesting content and have to save it for
later. I also see it having more potential than the other apps, with the new
recommendations service and opportunity saving other media.

I wouldn't call it a "news reader" though, and don't think it belongs in this
chart.

~~~
azinman2
I also find I put stuff in there only to never take it out again.

A better designed product wouldn't let me shoot myself in the foot.

~~~
acjohnson55
I agree. It should have a better way of making sure the "best" content for you
floats to the top of your list, rather than going by recency.

I'm intrigued by the new recommendations feature though, which might actually
be a reasonable way to leverage the social aspect of article sharing. But I
continue to lament the lack of a good way to have real discussion.

------
nugget
These news and reader apps have so much high value audience interest data that
they should be very valuable (in theory), given enough engaged users,
especially on mobile. Are they struggling to leverage the data to monetize for
fear of alienating users? What's the disconnect here?

~~~
chippy
My theory is that it's a problem with the very nature of "news" with human
psychology.

In short it's that The News is about sensation, what's new, what's uncommon.
It's not essential for any of us to read the news every day ultimately. If
someone important happens we will hear from it on our other channels
incidentally. I suspect that none of us actually enjoy reading the news or
watching tv news.

So - a news startup which needs mass appeal to take off has to appeal to all
the same users that currently consumes news, right? But, given the opportunity
on the internet people tend to avoid the normal sensationalist news if they
are getting it somewhere else, why should I want to go to a news aggregator?

I believe there to be the disconnect because it's about targeting the mass
market - but it seems as if more niche sites with niche audiences tend to be
more successful.

I also suspect that news aggegrators pitch by saying "look at all this news!
See how many sources the news comes from! Witness how our solution makes it
easier to consume" without addressing why someone consumes the news.

~~~
antsar
> why should I want to go to a news aggregator

Why are you here? Admittedly, HN is about 40% news and 60% links to
interesting tech stuff. But who said a "news aggregator" has to be 100% news?

~~~
chippy
(edits because xmas)

HackerNews is not mass market, HackerNews is niche. HN is also not "The News"
that one would read in these VC backed startups.

So I am here because this is a successful niche site which is not a VC backed
mass market site :-)

------
m52go
This is interesting. Anyone have any insight concerning interest in Flipboard?
Its total funding is an order of magnitude higher than all the others.

Was there something fundamentally different about their approach?

For what it's worth, I wasn't sufficiently impressed with any of the services
mentioned to regularly use any of them, except Pocket, which I only use
because I feel like it's the least-worst option.

What's interesting is that I _knew_ about 90% of these services when they were
launched, so it wasn't a marketing/reach problem.

~~~
mgirdley
The fatal flaw in all of these startups was they just aggregated content. None
of them solved the real problem of distilling the overwhelming amount of
content online into the few thing(s) I should read.

~~~
ghaff
That's probably fair. The quest for personalized news predates most people
being on the Internet [1] and I think it's fair to say that no one has really
come up with top-notch, personalized curation that blows people away. In
practice, it's easier to let social media, RSS readers, and sites like this
one provide you with a river of potentially interesting content that you skim
and dive into as appropriate.

I'm also not sure how much people would be willing to pay even for really good
content curation even if such a thing exited. And the reality is that curation
is hard because my interests on a given day depend on so many factors from how
busy I am to my mood to some event that piqued my interest.

[1]
[http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309](http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309)

~~~
doff
I found that Zite did an incredible job of presenting high-signal content for
me. I became so reliant on it that I would have paid a significant amount to
subscribe, probably on the order of a spotify subscription. But that was after
years of use and training; I can't imagine anybody selling me on a curation
service at any price without that experience.

------
mmanfrin
Why on earth would they make the chart at subject a compressed jpeg?

------
throw42
Unfortunately for them, Yahoo may have stopped acquiring companies, but
otherwise I would imagine HRH Marissa Mayer would have brought flipboard for
$2B+. I know they try buying everything shitty.

