China’s Toutiao Acquires Video App Flipagram

Mobile app allows users to make video mash-ups with soundtracks

Flipagram
Flipagram

Chinese news aggregator Toutiao has acquired mobile video app Flipagram, the two companies announced late Tuesday. Deal terms were not disclosed.

Flipagram began as a mobile app where users could create custom montages with photos and videos, and popular music providing the soundtrack. The company tried to take the sharing of its videos in-house and become more of a social network, which didn’t work out as well. Flipagram had been seeking a sale for some time, according to multiple industry insiders.

“We have been striving to enhance the efficiency of information communication,” Toutiao founder and CEO Yiming Zhang said in a statement. “We hope the state-of-art technology of Toutiao will bring something different to Flipagram.”

Toutiao plans to grow its presence in the U.S. and intends to pour more resources into Flipagram. More than 200 million users have created 500 million Flipagram videos since it was launched a little over three years ago.

“Since the launch of our free app in late 2013, Flipagram has been one of the most popular mobile video creation apps in the world,” Flipagram co-founder and CEO Farhad Mohit said in the statement. “We pioneered the licensed use of music clips in user-generated videos, and have enabled hundred of millions of users around the world to create and share amazing video stories, with just their phones. Today we are thrilled to take the next step in our journey, with Toutiao, whose expertise in content recommendations can help take the Flipagram mobile video network to the next level.”

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