Mike McCue Wants Flipboard To Be The Home Of Brand Advertising For Mobile Publishers

Just a month ago, mobile content curation startup Flipboard launched the second major update to its app. The new product enables its users to create their own magazines, and has been behind a huge increase in the number of people who use the app. But more than just a place for publishers to distribute and curate content, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue wants the app to also help publishers to monetize their content.

Today at Disrupt NY 2013, McCue said that publishers are facing a huge reduction in ad revenues. Publishers have seen revenues go from dollars in print, to dimes on the web, to pennies on mobile. According to McCue, a lot of the reason for that is the way that content is packaged and ads are displayed.

“If you’re Burberry or Gucci, you’re not going to run a banner ad,” McCue said. “To get brand ad dollars to move to digital, you need to create a beautiful experience.” He believes that Flipboard can build that kind of experience, enabling publishers to better monetize their content by creating a place where brand advertisers can buy beautiful, full-page ads.

In addition to monetizing through higher-CPM brand ads, Flipboard also has the opportunity to create new ways for publishers to sell their content direct to consumers on its platform. That means doing so either through subscriptions or even selling individual pieces of content, according to McCue.

“As a publisher you should decide what content is free, and what you’d pay for,” McCue said. You have to get the packaging right, but people will pay for content.”