Flipboard : 3 million new users since launch of personalized magazines

Two weeks ago Flipboard, a social network aggregation magazine, released a new feature allowing users to create personalized magazines. Each of us essentially became a magazine editor with the power to pull individual sources, subjects, and stories into one magazine available to others.

The result? Half a million personalized magazines have been created and Flipboard has added 3 million users, bringing its total users to 53 million people.

Per Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

…[O]ver 50 percent of its users are reading these personalized ‘zines daily. Some of these have been created by publishers themselves, with a few of the more popular ones coming from Esquire, Rolling Stone, Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic and others. Meanwhile, magazines created by users are also popular – TechCrunch contributor MG Siegler’s “Reading List” mag, for example, made #3 on the most popular list.

More interesting is how Flipboard is now read, edited, and shared.

…[T]he magazine is transitioning to become a morning news paper of sorts, with users doing the most reading around 9:00 AM, while magazine creation takes place in the afternoon (1:00 PM) and sharing peaks in the evening (7:00 PM). You can almost see the flow of the content creation to consumption process at work here, starting with reading content, then magazine creators curating the articles for niche readerships, and finally leading to those who spread content further on social networks.

Could Flipboard become the principal place where your law blog content is consumed, and shared? Stranger things have happened.

People’s reading habits have changed. We’re moving away from going to one site, one blog, one newspaper, or one magazine. We’re reading content from multiple sources in one place where the content is aggregated.

Better yet, the content’s aggregation and what we read is effected by the people we trust. Have our friends shared, liked, or read the content? If not, the content may never reach our eyes through social aggregation apps such as Flipboard.

Of course it’s going to take time to sort things out. Traditional publishers want money. How do they get their add revenue through Flipboard?

Law firms and lawyers have egos, brands, and traffic needs to fuel that get in the way of what they ought to be seeking – relationships and word of mouth reputation that can be accelerated by apps like Flipboard.

18 months ago I asked if Flipboard could drive the future of legal publishing.

The popularity of personalized magazines and the continued growth of Flipboard are signs that it may. Publishing legal periodicals online, promoting same to draw traffic and building paywalls to keep people out is inherently flawed today.

Publishing a law blog and establishing the goal of getting traffic to the blog and your website, above all else, is misguided.

Publishers, law bloggers included, out to be looking to the future where content is socially aggregated for presentation to their target audience in an eloquent environment like Flipboard.