Twitter has expressed interest in buying Flipboard, the digital magazine app with more than 100 million registered accounts, in an all-stock deal valuing the company at $1 billion, according to a report in Re/code on Monday.
The social network has apparently been in talks with Flipboard about a potential acquisition since January, though those talks are currently on hold.
Flipboard was founded by former Netscape executive and serial entrepreneur Mike McCue in 2010, who built the Palo Alto, California-based startup as a tablet app that pulls content from publishers including the New York Times and Vanity Fair and presents it in a magazine-style layout. The company, which has raised nearly $160 million from backers including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Ron Conway and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said it currently has 65 million monthly active users, up from 50 million in February.
Since then, however, Flipboard's growth has reportedly plateaued, partly because it doesn't come pre-loaded on some Samsung phones in the U.S. any longer -- a partnership Samsung had with Flipboard since 2012. It's also entirely possible that Flipboard has reached a threshold for users.
A Flipboard acquisition for Twitter, makes sense, at least on some level. Flipboard probably would not add much to Twitter's 302 million monthly active users, although the app does a better job at surfacing news content and keeping it around for some time for users to catch and consume -- something Twitter, for its part, has gotten somewhat better at in recent months, with features like Highlights, and Flipboard has long offered its users the ability to pull in content from their Twitter accounts.
Both Twitter and Flipboard declined to comment to Mashable about the report.