In which I disagree with Marco Arment

In which I disagree with Marco Arment

Marco also has strong opinions on the Flipboard-as-scam discussion:

 They promise “reach” or “distribution”, but usually, they’re just filling their monetized product with your content for free.

He makes the example of Business Insider (no link), which I agree is the classic example of this sort of thing. Medium is a less-egregious example. Both subsume the original sources and insert their own branding, so I agree with Marco that I doubt either drives much traffic to the original source. 

(That said, on the few occasions I followed a link to Business Insider, the BI article often proved to be an incomplete summary of the original piece, so I did in fact follow the link just to get the real story. But BI had already got their page view out of me, so I suppose they win.)

However, I don’t think Flipboard falls into this same category, because it leaves the source branding very much intact. Flipboard is the convenient portal through which I read recent content from many sources, not an outlet at all. This is why I compared it to RSS in my original piece, something that I hope Marco is still in favour of!