UPDATED 16:18 EDT / AUGUST 23 2016

NEWS

Pinterest buys “read it later” app Instapaper

Pinterest, Inc. has announced that it has acquired popular “save for later” app, Instapaper Holdings, Inc., for an undisclosed amount in a bid to beef up its reach and expand what its digital pinboard platform can do.

This marks the second time Instapaper has been acquired in the last three years, as it was most recently sold by creator Marco Arment to New York City-based startup studio, Betaworks Studio LLC, in 2013. The Instapaper team says that their app has grown a lot since then, and it now has tools and content that will compliment Pinterest’s existing services.

“In the three years since Betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment,” the Instapaper team wrote in a blog post, “we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.”

“All of these features and developments revolved around the core mission of Instapaper, which is allowing our users to discover, save, and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper. Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale.”

The Instapaper team will be moving from the Betaworks studio in New York to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and it is not currently clear what other structural changes will take place within the company.

Instapaper lives on, Instaparser doesn’t

Instapaper is designed to save text-heavy webpages, such as news articles or blog posts, to be read later either online or offline, which makes the service both similar and entirely different to Pinterest’s image-focused platform. The Instapaper team was quick to note that the acquisition will have little direct impact on its end users, and the app will continue to exist separately from Pinterest’s platform.

There is no word yet on what sort of integrations there might be between the two services in the future, but the Instapaper team said that they are looking into applying their parsing technology to some of Pinterest’s Rich Pin types, which include additional information directly on the pins such as maps, phone numbers, online shopping links, and so on. This likely explains why the company also announced today that it would be shutting down its Instaparser product, a subscription-based service that allows developers to parse text and image content from websites.

In a statement to Recode, a Pinterest spokesperson also noted that the company is interested in Instapaper’s content sorting algorithms, likely as a way to recommend popular pins to users.

Photo by Johan Larsson 

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