Pinterest Acquires Read-It-Later App Instapaper

Popular app Instapaper, designed to allow users to save notable news articles to read at a later time, has been acquired by Pinterest. Created by Marco Arment in 2008, Instapaper was one of the first apps that implemented read-it-later functionality, and it was certainly one of the most widely used and well-known apps in the genre.

Instapaper, available on iOS, Android, Kindle, and the web, was first sold to Betaworks in 2013 and now it belongs to Pinterest. Pinterest plans to use Instapaper to encourage Pinterest users to save more articles to the site, a feature that's existed for several years but isn't often used, and some of Instapaper's search functionality will be integrated into Pinterest. In a blog post, Instapaper said the acquisition would also give it the resources to grow its core mission -- "allowing our users to discover, save, and experience interesting web content."

Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we're excited to take those learnings to Pinterest's discovery products. We'll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.

Instapaper will continue to operate as a standalone app and service, and no changes are expected for end users. The company will, however, be ending development on Instaparser on November 1, 2016.