Popular Read-Later App Instapaper Sold to Betaworks

Smart, I think he saw the writing on the wall and that excellent free apps like Pocket would dominate even if his app was a bit superior. It was time to get out.

He successfully found a new income stream with "The Magazine", got a large payday you can assume from the Instapaper sale, and has freed time and resources to persue more successful future app markets instead of plugging holes in a leaking one.

Now we know how he was able to plunk down $100,000 for a decked out BMW M5. Congrats to Marco.

King Marco. You've done it again.

Merlin will be proud.

canyonblue737 said:

Smart, I think he saw the writing on the wall and that excellent free apps like Pocket would dominate even if his app was a bit superior. It was time to get out.

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I wouldn't be surprised if Pocket completely nuked Instapaper's revenue stream. It's really much better suited to mobile reading than Instapaper was — Instapaper was always bare-bones, which was fine for in-browser use. But nowadays with readers like Pocket and Flipboard, a bare-bones app for $3.99 was not a very good value proposition. Ironically, you'd probably expect something like Instapaper to be free and Pocket/Flipboard to be $3.99 but there you go.

Congrats to Marco though. I know what it takes to create and maintain an app. Times they change though, gotta roll with it!

Nice advertising

Pretty sure the writing wasn't 'on the wall'. Nobody wouldn't have bought it if it was, and Marco wouldn't be holding a stake in it either. All signs point to it having a bright future with more weight behind it.

I still use Instapaper though!

accidental said:

Pretty sure the writing wasn't 'on the wall'. Nobody wouldn't have bought it if it was, and Marco wouldn't be holding a stake in it either. All signs point to it having a bright future with more weight behind it.

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As a long-time Instapaper user that recently moved over to Pocket about 6 months ago, I strongly disagree with this.

Pocket is definitely the superior offering in almost every respect, back-end and front-end. Instapaper's iphone app still uses standard iOS elements from 2008, and the handling of articles are much more hit-and-miss compared to Pocket. Given that pocket is also free, I'd say it is a sinking ship.

Good

Actually, Good riddance.

Instapaper was unique when it came out and within about a year of my purchase it became useless with Safari's reader, and Reading list, evernote's clear, Evernote etc.

But what bugs me is I tried to unsubscribe to Instapaper three times and was ignored all three times. The only way I was able to accomplish unsubscribing was canceling my credit card.

Maybe the new owners should check out how many real customers it has during its due diligence.

syd430 said:

As a long-time Instapaper user that recently moved over to Pocket about 6 months ago, I strongly disagree with this.

Pocket is definitely the superior offering in almost every respect, back-end and front-end. Instapaper's iphone app still uses standard iOS elements from 2008, and the handling of articles are much more hit-and-miss compared to Pocket. Given that pocket is also free, I'd say it is a sinking ship.

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Instapaper does seem a bit crude, I have to admit. Heck, a lot of people are probably just using Safari's built in Reading List feature instead.

Instapaper was a piece of overpriced crap. Pretty sure the guy was able to sell based on his name (and the app's name) alone. There's no other reason I could see this thing being purchased...

chorner said:

Instapaper was a piece of overpriced crap. Pretty sure the guy was able to sell based on his name (and the app's name) alone. There's no other reason I could see this thing being purchased...

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How do you get a 'name' and an app's 'name' if your app is crap?

Is your working hypothesis that Instapaper got famous by accident and that freak event at the beginning kept it famous for all those years?

manu chao said:

How do you get a 'name' and an app's 'name' if your app is crap?

Is your working hypothesis that Instapaper got famous by accident and that freak event at the beginning kept it famous for all those years?

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Instapaper, the name itself is catchy and sounds bigger than the product actually is.

The idea is noble, but both the Instapaper website itself and the iPhone app are horribly put together. I have no idea how it could be taken seriously enough to be bought out other than for the name.

chorner said:

Instapaper, the name itself is catchy and sounds bigger than the product actually is.

The idea is noble, but both the Instapaper website itself and the iPhone app are horribly put together. I have no idea how it could be taken seriously enough to be bought out other than for the name.

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Wow, we can't get more superficial than this: Apps get popular mainly because of their names?

For a guy who left Tumblr and built a corner of the app market almost himself (Remember, Apple's reading list is a response to read-later apps), good for Marco for building a product, nurturing it, and making some money off of it. His customers had a good run with it, and in a changing landscape how long can we really expect a smart and driven guy like him to stay with something on his own?

It's too bad that more great apps, like Sparrow, for ex, don't get to grow and mature like Instapaper did. I think Marco did it well and did it right. Good for him to go and get paid!

An honest and descriptive software company name...

I paid for the "premium" version of Instapaper a few years ago. Loved it at first, but then Marco removed the text-search feature when he released an update to the app — and offered text search as an in-app purchase.

Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky.

accidental said:

Pretty sure the writing wasn't 'on the wall'. Nobody wouldn't have bought it if it was, and Marco wouldn't be holding a stake in it either. All signs point to it having a bright future with more weight behind it.

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I don't think the writing's on the wall, exactly, but the list of software products with a bright future after being bought by a larger company is surprisingly short.

I still use Instapaper, and will continue using it unless it turns into something like Pocket.

It may not have as many features as Pocket or as wide of a reach as Apple's Reading List, but it has a dedicated user base. There are a lot of geeks who would rather pay for a service to keep it going than use a free service and watch it die.

A couple of services that are "free" that aren't what they used to be:

Google Reader - Free, Ad-Supported, Dead (as of 7/1)
Twitter - Free, Ad-Supported, Killing off 3rd party clients that helped jumpstart the service, Hashtag wasteland

dwsolberg said:

I don't think the writing's on the wall, exactly, but the list of software products with a bright future after being bought by a larger company is surprisingly short.

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I would be surprised if it were killed off any time soon. The way Marco's announcement read, it seems like he thought long and hard about this decision. He's going to stay on to help with the service's direction, but he won't be writing the app. I think Marco would buy it back before he let it die.

Not quite the star it's made out to be

Instapaper is the app that I *wanted* to like more. Arment's intention was in the right place. But--hoo boy--the errors. Even the articles chosen by the editors would give repeated viewing glitches and errors.

Things seemed to get buggier as time wore on, and so I used it less and less. Finally last month, after trying to open three articles and getting three errors in a row, I just stopped.