Flipboard CEO Mike McCue took the stage at Disrupt NY 2013 today to talk about his company and the changing nature of media and publishing, and he revealed updated stats about user adoption of his company’s platform. Since the version 2.0 launch in March, it has added 6 million new users, which is up 3 million from just over two weeks ago. That rate of growth means Flipboard is growing much faster than ever before, which indicates that the personalized magazine creation tool is really catching on.
Back two weeks ago, Flipboard had reported that 500,000 magazines had been created by its users since the launch two weeks before that. Now, users have created over 1 million digital magazines using the new tool. Together, the stats are a clear indication that this is an area of interest for Flipboard, which previously offered a virtual magazine experience based on a user’s social network accounts and activities. A self-curated feed that can be shared around to others is something that turns everyone into publishers, and while not dramatically different from Flipboard’s original model, the decision to basically extend publisher tools to others has provided not only a means to provide a new vector for user engagement, but also a potential revenue opportunity.
McCue says that some magazines people put together are something he would definitely pay for, and that he’d like very much to build pay options into the platform in the future.
Another coming product launch should help Flipboard grow even quicker: The version 2.0 launch on Android. It’s coming “very, very, very soon” according to McCue, though he wouldn’t put a firm timeline on it. Usage ramped up quickly after the introduction of the Android version of the original app back in June of 2012, which helped them grow from five million to 20 million users over the course of just eight months spanning the beginning of 2012 to the end of August.