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   Betaworks Takes over Instapaper

   Glenn Fleishman

   The five-year-old Instapaper service for storing Web articles that one
   wants to read later and without formatting has been taken over by
   Betaworks. Instapaper's owner and developer, Marco Arment, [1]said in a
   blog post today that he had sold a majority interest in the product to
   Betaworks, an investment firm and incubator that owns Digg and bitly.

   Arment developed Instapaper for his own use while he worked at Tumblr,
   a blog-hosting company, and then opened it up to colleagues and
   friends. In January 2008, he made it available to anyone to use, and
   was overwhelmed by the response. He eventually left Tumblr to turn it
   into a full-time business. Instapaper has several competitors, notably
   [2]Pocket (formerly Read It Later) and [3]Readability.

   Instapaper arrived at a neat juncture: the iPhone was a year old,
   cellular data networks were becoming ubiquitous but often spotty
   (especially on public transportation), and long-form journalism was on
   the rise. Many sites then lacked suitable mobile versions and optimized
   main Web sites, which required downloading heavy-bandwidth pages that
   were often hard to read in the browser.

   Instapaper started as a Web app; iOS and Android versions followed from
   which most of the product's revenue arises. After purchasing a mobile
   app, there are no additional fees to access all the features of the
   service. Instapaper also makes its service available to third-party
   apps, although users of those apps have to have an otherwise
   [4]optional $1-per-month subscription via the Instapaper Web site. (The
   fee adds additional features, such as searching and removing ads, too.)

   Betaworks is a venture-capital firm that has invested [5]in a
   remarkable range of interesting companies 'including Kickstarter,
   Pinterest, and Twitter ' as well as providing startup-style resources
   in its offices for companies that reach the scale to fledge into their
   own separate operations. Betaworks owns a significant though
   undisclosed portion of several of these, including bitly. It purchased
   Digg to rebuild it into a more news-oriented site, which dovetails
   neatly with Instapaper's features.

   (Disclosure: I contract for Arment as the executive editor of his other
   project, The Magazine, but have no financial interest in Instapaper nor
   any foreknowledge of the deal.)

References

   1. http://www.marco.org/2013/04/25/instapaper-next-generation
   2. http://getpocket.com/
   3. http://www.readability.com/
   4. https://www.instapaper.com/subscription
   5. http://Betaworks.com/network.php

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