McCue discusses how Flipboard will make money

Part II of Mike McCue interview

In the second part of my interview with Mike McCue, Mike tells me how Flipboard works with publishers and content providers.  Firstly, Flipboard's goal is to get users to visit those publishers' sites and make posts "re-tweetable."  Flipboard does this by serving a snippet of an article, and then if a user is intrigued, he or she can tap it and go directly to the content provider's website to read the rest.

"If they (content providers) can make their content more relevant, users are going to click on it, read it, re-tweet it, which is going to be good for the publishers because it increases monetization," said McCue.

But how will Flipboard make money, since it doesn't display ads (yet)? 

The company believes that if it can enable a publisher to generate revenue for the same digital content and have that digital content look better and make the monetization more effective, then the benefits will rub off on Flipboard.  

The company has had some very big name investors, including Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher.  McCue said that the investors were strategically chosen because the company wanted to get their advice. They raised $10.5 million to gain a lot of runway so as to put lots of time and energy into creating a worthwhile project.  The company may consider doing another fundraising round.

Ultimately, what is the long-term goal for Flipboard?  The company's overarching dream is to improve how people discover and share new content across their social graph.