Graze is joining Flipboard
Almost two years ago I wrote a post here about a repo called sky-feeder, which at the time was about four days old and consisted mostly of a JSON schema and a great deal of optimism. The idea was that feeds ought to be declarative - that you should be able to chain regex filters and vector similarity checks and full ML classifiers together with arbitrarily nested boolean logic, and that if the building blocks were primitive enough, the people assembling them eventually wouldn't need to be engineers at all. I ended that post by saying maybe none of it works. After nearly two years of total radio silence here on my site while I worked it out, I'm delighted to report otherwise: on August 26th, Flipboard acquired Graze. TechCrunch has the details.
Some numbers, mostly because I still find them hard to believe. In the 21 months since that post, Graze delivered something on the order of 41 billion posts to roughly 12 million people, across north of 7,000 feeds, about 60% of which are monetized at this point. We raised a million dollars at the beginning of 2025 and spent approximately none of it on marketing, because the feeds did that work themselves. None of which happens without [COFOUNDERS / TEAM], who took a weekend project and turned it into infrastructure.
The piece of this I'm proudest of is also the least glamorous, which is how the ads work. They're contextual rather than behavioral. There's no identity graph underneath any of it, no cross-site tracking, nothing about you getting shopped around an exchange in the time it takes a page to render. If a brand wants to reach game developers, it buys a slot in a feed that game developers built, and the curator who built that feed decides whether that particular ad runs at all. The split is 70/30, the 70 going to the curator. To me this is the load-bearing bit of the whole project: you will never fix the feed so long as the only party capable of monetizing it is the same party that ranks it. Pull those apart and the economics start rewarding the people doing the actual curatorial work.
What Flipboard brings is the thing we could never have built ourselves at two people. Fifteen years of advertiser relationships, a real ad sales operation, and Surf, which has been running on Graze's feed infrastructure for a while now and is exactly where this was always headed. Graze stops being a Bluesky thing and becomes an ATProto thing. The feeds keep running, the rules stay public, curators keep their 70, and the whole apparatus gets to point at a much larger surface than one app.
Mike McCue is a true believer in this stuff, which is a rarer quality than it should be, and getting to work on the interesting parts alongside people who already know how to do the rest of it is about the best outcome I could have drawn up. More soon.
