Unlike Digg at the time it was acquired, however, Instapaper has a business model: It’s a paid product. The iPhone and iPad apps are $3.99, and the Android app is $2.99. Users can also install a bookmarklet to save articles.

On his blog, Arment wrote of the acquisition, “We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.” He said he has been looking for an opportunity to “try other apps and creative projects.”

Betaworks’ acquisition of Instapaper fits with the firm’s strategy of investing in both short and long-form content. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick said at the paidContent conference last week that companies shouldn’t favor one over the other: They need to invest in both. Digg is planning to launch a Google Reader replacement, and Instapaper’s technology could possibly be put to work on that project.

Here’s a video of Borthwick talking to Om Malik at paidContent Live:

Betaworks has developed a model for these rapid launches and development cycles (100 to 150 days), and the company relies heavily on data to see if they stick in the marketplace. On Wednesday Betaworks launched Poncho, a super simple weather app; a couple weeks ago there was Giphy, a search engine for GIFs, which Borthwick said was so popular that 2 million users crashed the system when it first launched. Before that there was tapestry, a collection of mobile tappable stories.

But when Betaworks isn’t churning out its own content, it’s slicing, dicing, merging and mixing the content of others. One of the things that Betaworks is most famous for is its acquisition of the former social reading site Digg for a reported $500,000. Betaworks then merged it with some of the tools of its sluggish News.me creation.

Borthwick said that when the company bought Digg it had $250,000 a month worth of legacy costs, with $10,000 in monthly operating profits. Digg was jacked up and it had to pull out the needle, said Borthwick. After switching over to Amazon, building a new stack and relaunching with Betawork’s algorithms, Digg now costs closer to $20,000 a month to operate. “That’s the math of the cloud,” said Borthwick.

The overhaul seems to be working. The new Digg, and its users, are highly mobile-centric. Fifty percent of the traffic during the week and 55 percent on weekends comes from mobile traffic, said Borthwick. It was closer to 5 to 6 percent mobile before the relaunch. Digg now has a couple of million “active, rabid” users, said Borthwick. The Betaworks team pays particular attention to the amount of engaged users on Digg, which is high.

Attention is being fractured into a bipolar fashion, leading to condensed, fractional content on one hand and uber long-form content on the other. It’s Twitter vs House of Cards and Homeland, explained Borthwick. To build media companies and products in this era, you have to keep an eye on both, said Borthwick. To address that long form content market, Betaworks has created some tools over the past year around long-form story telling.

Not all of the innovation will come from newly launched media projects. Borthwick said he admires the work that Forbes and Bloomberg have done, as well as new media sites like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Upworthy.

CHeck out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

The Kindle highlights feature lets reader select and “clip” favorite quotes and passages from the ebooks they are reading, then access those highlights online later. At launch, Findings’ main feature was the ability for users to easily share those Kindle highlights with others by syncing their Kindle account with the Findings’ web bookmarklet. Applications such as Evernote also let users sync and save their Kindle highlights.

Findings maintains that web clipping has become an increasingly important part of the service it provides, though Betaworks CEO John Borthwick acknowledged that the ability to share Kindle highlights was the reason many people started using Findings in the first place. He said that Amazon had known about Findings for a year and had been fine with the service until now. ”I don’t want to intuit what Amazon’s motivations are,” he said, but suggested that the decision was driven not by Amazon but by book publishers: “This is probably what publishers want.”

That sentiment is echoed in a blog post from Findings general manager Lauren Leto. “Amazon has to abide by what publishers demand, and this is sometimes at odds with what users want,” she writes. “As a small startup we had no choice but to comply with their demand that we discontinue the feature that allow users to import and sync Kindle data in Findings.”

I’ve asked Amazon for a comment, but does it makes sense that this decision would be driven by book publishers? They are already able to restrict Kindle highlighting: they have the ability to limit the amount of content clipped from an ebook (and Evernote users who wanted to save their highlights have been blocked from saving too much content). It makes sense that piracy-fearing publishers don’t want users to “clip” too much of a book and share it. Scanning the content shared on Findings, though, it’s clear that most users aren’t sharing more than a paragraph of text.

Amazon itself lets readers share their highlights and clippings through a feature called “Public Notes,” and it’s possible the company is cracking down on competing services like Findings in an effort to promote its own service. Considering that “Public Notes” is relatively under the radar, that seems somewhat unlikely. But the new Sony Reader lets users share passages through Evernote, and Amazon may be planning to make its own sharing features more robust.

Finally, Amazon simply may not want third-party apps accessing Kindle highlights. If so, we should expect to see services like Evernote cutting off that functionality soon.

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick’s advicefor the media industry: think about producing “information” — not “content.”

Why? “Content is very much about the package, very much about the container”, Borthwick said during a Q&A with GigaOM founder Om Malik at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

The moment you start thinking about it as information, I think people start thinking about it differently, they think less about the container and the structure and a little bit more about the users.

That’s especially important as the concept of “container” changes with the increase in realtime data and sharing across platforms.

The pair also talked about how to use that data (Betaworks has started both Bitly and Chartbeat); how Facebook isn’t making the best use of its data for advertising and the need to break the CPM ad model; why Apple’s app store and Google Play don’t work; and a lot more packed into the embedded video below:

Jim Bankoff, Chairman and CEO, Vox Media

Data helps destroy containers, and that’s a good thing. Data creates new content and information experiences and helps bring an end to the notion of content silos, Betaworks’ John Borthwick said: “The moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.” Forrester’s James McQuivey pointed out that it’s not just a “tablet or iPad world,” but an “everything world” — and millions of people are consuming content not on iPads or e-readers but on gaming systems like the Xbox 360.

Digital storytelling is a native art. Stories on the Internet are not a new form of magazine or newspaper stories, but a medium in their own right — just like radio or TV. Publishers should develop their platforms accordingly rather than just repurposing other print vehicles. When Wenner Media released Us Weekly on iPad for the first time, it figured out a way to enable the “passalong” that’s so popular with the magazine’s print edition. As Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told us, George Lucas had to build a new story-telling platform called Lucasfilm so that he could tell the story of “Star Wars.” And don’t say blogging is dead: “That’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expression is dead,” said WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Not all “media” are created equal. Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Betaworks’ John Borthwick gave a rude awakening to Big Media executives, urging them to give up control of their content — and even to stop calling it “content.” But declaring new digital networks victors over somewhat different traditional print and broadcast operators after simply labelling each “media” can sometimes seem counterproductive and insufficient: What’s being created now are entirely new kinds of information vehicles. The industry is truly “at the crossroads” suggested by the paidContent 2012 conference’s subtitle– but technologists and information producers may now be heading in different directions, as well as speaking different languages.

Publishers have to sell their brands directly to consumers. “Publishing companies need to understand that the thing [companies] like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers really respect is a brand,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said in an explanation of why those companies agreed to send customers directly to the Pottermore site to buy e-books. “If we’ve demonstrated anything, it’s the power of a brand,” he said, noting that over half of Pottermore’s e-book sales result from readers coming directly to the site instead of being referred there by the retailers. Not every brand is Harry Potter — but “need to understand that their role in the future is creating these brands,” Redmayne said.

It’s time to toss CPM as a yardstick for online advertising success. How can Facebook be so inept at advertising? Because it’s handing advertisers a sledgehammer not a scalpel. Betaworks’ Borthwick and GigaOM’s Om Malik say it’s time to discard old-fashioned display ads as the basic unit of online ad success. Instead, it’s time for advertisers to adapt their ads to the evolving nature of the internet itself. That means forgetting about CPMs and focusing on data and social dynamics. On a broader level, it means re-imagining basic precepts of advertising and product discovery in a world where Web pages are being eclipsed by new types of online discovery and interaction.

If you didn’t make it to the TimesCenter yesterday, you’ll find video of all yesterday’s panels here (registration required). And let us know your takeaways from the day in the comments.

Thinking of what they produce as information rather than content to be packaged, the Betaworks CEO said, puts the focus on the value of that information to users, and the package or delivery system — whether it’s a magazine or a newspaper or a mobile app — becomes secondary. Only that way can media companies figure out what and how their users want, he said.

The language drives the way you think about things, and since we’re dealing with a new media landscape, we need to redefine some of the words. For me, the moment you start thinking about it as information, you start to think less about the package and more about the users.

That need to understand what users want was the driving force behind two of the first services that Betaworks created, Borthwick said: Bit.ly started as a simple URL-shortener for social networks such as Twitter, but has become a tool that provides data about what links are shared and which ones are clicked on, and Chartbeat shows editors and writers what articles are getting the most engagement, but in real time rather than hours or days after they have been published. Chartbeat, he said, has become “like a Bloomberg terminal for editors.”

We wanted to understand the data and the “data exhaust” around publishing… to understand the tight loop between commenting, discovery and publishing, and the data helps inform that, but in real time Transforming publishing into real-time changes the nature of what you’re doing.

In order to appreciate that shift, content and media companies not only need to change the tools they are using, Borthwick said, but they have to fundamentally alter the way they think about the “content” business and what value they are ultimately adding for users.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

I’m also thinking about the range of interviews on tap, including two I’m doing. As president of Condé Nast, Bob Sauerberg is managing the translation of some of the magazine industry’s most iconic brands to a variety of devices and formats. In some cases, CN has tried to revive a brand by going pure digital, most famously with Gourmet Live. We’ll talk about what Sauerberg has learned, how committed CN is to app distribution, whether magazine consortium Next Issue Media can gain any meaningful traction and more.

Jon Miller is the chief digital officer of News Corp., the home of tablet tabloid pioneer The Daily, as revolutionary in its own way as USA Today was in 1982, and of a lot of digital experiments and acquisitions with mixed results (including MySpace, an acquisition Miller didn’t make but had to unwind after numerous rescue attempts failed). A current fixation for the former AOL CEO: video across properties, including the Wall Street Journal and IGN, not just the traditional sources of Fox networks and studios. And through it all, News Corp. has to protect its traditional billions and cope with the constant image hits in the UK. The same internet that offers so much potential revenue also makes it easy for every ripple to go tidal wave.

Other one-on-ones include:

• betaworks CEO John Borthwick with GigaOM Founder Om Malik
• VC Fred Wilson with Mathew Ingram, who outlined some ideas here
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo will talk with our legal writer Jeff Roberts about the challenges facing authors from copyright to consolidation to pricing
• Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne will talk to Laura Hazard Owen about taking a beloved brand digital
• Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg in conversation with Anil Dash about platforms, power and disruption.

And that’s just part of the day. Check out the complete schedule and the full list of confirmed speakers is here.

The remaining ickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities that come with networking from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

Thanks to our sponsors for their support. If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Joshua Haviv].

• On Friday, Facebook is set to flip the switch from years of hyped speculation to the reality of a mega-hyped IPO. It’s waiting for regulatory approval to spend $1 billion on Instagram. As I write this, the news is breaking that Pinterest is about raise a round that will follow it at $1.5 billion. A quick scan of our own news pages shows hundreds of millions being invested in the digital content ecosystem — often with a firm belief that there is revenue somewhere to justify those investments, but without any real sense of where it will come from. We’ll ask John Borthwick and Fred Wilson, among others, where they are investing and why.
• Cable and broadcast networks have been unveiling new programming slates into a more fragmented video universe than ever before. Discovery Communications bought Revision 3 for $30 million, Turner Broadcasting invested in Funny or Die. At the same time, YouTube’s $100 million investment in original programming is rolling out channel by channel, AOL is finally moving ahead with its major video plans, Yahoo is investing in original programs with Tom Hanks, Katie Couric and others — and so are Hulu, Amazon and Netflix. Brian Bedol, who is trying to replicate his success as a cable network founder with YouTube channels and other efforts; Lisa Gersh, president and COO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and Rob Burnett, CEO of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, will take us inside their thinking as they make their way through The Video Boom.
• Just this week, one of our moderators turned from board member and adjunct professor to active exec again. That means Larry Kramer will be sitting down as president and publisher of USA Today with John Paton and Jim Bankoff to talk about what it takes to lead and innovate, to be a “new publisher.” Since paidContent 2011, Bankoff taken SB Nation, a network of sports sites, to Vox Media and added a tech vertical with The Verge and has a gaming vertical on the way. Paton, meanwhile, has added MediaNews to his Journal Register portfolio, and is now the the CEO of the much-larger DigitalFirst.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms.

We’ll be covering the topics that matter to you in our signature one-day, single-stage, 360-degree style. We have a stellar roster of speakers and moderators who are more than up for the task, including:

• Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp.
• Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast
• Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
• Josh Marshall, Editor & Publisher, TalkingPointsMemo.com
• Mark Johnson, CEO, Zite
• Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer, WordPress and Founder, Automattic

The full list of confirmed speakers is here.

Just as important as the speakers, though, is the fact that we have great attendees with a lot to add to the discussion.

But space is limited and tickets are selling fast — so if you want to take full advantage of this jam-packed agenda and the opportunities that come with networking throughout the day from breakfast to closing cocktails, I strongly suggest you register now.

If you’re interested in sponsoring paidContent 2012, please contact eventsales@gigaom.com.

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

For all you kids who don’t know MAD magazine, well Google it, and then go find the old copies and enjoy some good wit and humor. However, of course, if you had to reinvent and re-imagine MAD magazine for the post-Facebook, post-Twitter and the post-YouTube generation, you would completely eschew the paper and focus on the iPad instead. (Yes, I do know MAD has just launched an iPad app.) And it would takes its cues from Internet/social-driven Pop Culture and turn it into a sort of a game.

And that is exactly what Punch! Media of New York is doing. The start-up is co-founded by David S. Bennahum (CEO,) Maer Roshan (Founding Editor,) Ethan Fletcher (Chief Operating Officer,) Dany Levy and Daniel Wyszynski who is Chief Technology Officer. The effort is backed by John Borthwick’s Betaworks, TechStars, New Enterprise Associates and Jason Calacanis. Incidentally, Roshan was building Radar, a gossip rag right next door to the old Red Herring offices in an incubator on 11th street back in the day, so it seems he has a thing for incubators.

What the app has done is essentially take popular videos and Internet memes and turned them into fun-interactive graphical games. Click on an icon and it opens up a window of Bjork going postal on a TV reporter in Thailand. Click another and another video or a game pops up. Here is how they themselves describe it in their press release

Punch! is an interactive satirical app that redefines the content experience with game-like engagement and razor sharp design. Punch! fuses the experience of mobile games with real-time web offerings to present content in a way that can only exist on a tablet. It is a new iPad Platform that encourages users to “play with pop culture.”

Punch! produces original content exclusively showcased in “The Culture Shelf,” a series of scrollable shelves presenting diverse cultural offerings – both high and low. Punch! feels like an interactive variety show, featuring a range of pop culture sketches and vignettes that combine animation, sound, web applications such as YouTube and Google Maps, and social sharing tools.

Sure there is a lot of kitsch on this site, but I can tell you, the dumb stuff was not this much fun. I hope you get a chance to play with it. It is free and you can download it from the app store on your iPad.