Chinese news company acquires Flipagram app

World Today

Flipagram — a Los Angeles based social media app — has just been acquired by a huge Chinese news company Toutiao, for an undisclosed amount.

CGTN’s Phil Lavelle reports.

What Flipagram does is takes a bunch of your pictures and then turns them into little movies with music underneath them for sharing to social media. But it needs to grow its user base — and that’s not easy in a saturated market.

In fact, just six months ago, it was being reported that Flipagram was looking around for a buyer.

Facebook, Google and others kept silent. But it went further afield to China.

“Toutiao has a news recommendation feature that is pretty sophisticated and it can be used by them to recommend user content within their own app — feeding people content they might be interested in. And then it might help them further expand in china,” said Garrett Reim, tech reporter from Los Angeles Business Journal.