The idea is somewhat similar to those Magnetic Poetry Kits: Users slide preselected words on top of artwork to create a poem. “The whole process takes less than a minute on your phone or tablet,” Storybird posted on its blog Thursday.

Storybird CEO Mark Ury told me that about 20 percent of the works that users created on Storybird were poetry,”so we knew we had demand.”

On the blog, he outlined the reasons that the company is excited about launching a poetry option:

“1. Fits on a phone, so that our members can use it anywhere. We want visual storytelling everywhere, because people and their stories are everywhere.

2. An even simpler storytelling format. Stories are hard to write and take time! Poetry is short and sweet. We used the same creative constraints for Poetry as we did with books: you can do only one thing, but that one thing is fantastic.

3. Poems are hyper social and look great on Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Your friends, family, and fans can easily read, share, and embed them.

4. They’re stunning. Poetry scales from the phone to the desktop (an AMAZING engineering and aesthetic feat from the team) to ensure the art looks great. It uses the same colour algorithms as our book covers and includes a light transparency on the word vessels, which makes the final compositions elegant and rich.

5. As with books and artwork comments, Poetry is designed to be family friendly. The word sets are fixed and were developed by a seasoned book editor from one of the Big Six publishing houses to enable creative expression without creative maligning.” (Ury wouldn’t say who the editor is.)

Storybird, which launched in 2010, has over two million members. The company has raised $850,000 in seed funding and is advised by former Tumblr exec John Maloney. The site operates on a freemium model, selling memberships to teachers and individuals, and also lets users pay to download stories as PDFs or order print versions of their creations. If the poetry model takes off, Ury says, Storybird will “sell downloads to print at home. If those do well, we’ll offer professionally printed cards or small posters.”

Many Storybird customers are schools. The poetry option isn’t rolled out for school accounts yet, but will be available to them soon.

Nidhi Chanani http://storybird.com/nidhi-chanani/

A little under three years later, Storybird, which is based out of Toronto, has over two million members (and has inspired a dozen marriage proposals). The site works with artists from around the world, who upload their portfolios onto Storybird’s platform. Users choose their art, sequence the images any way they like and add text to turn them into a story. They can then share the story across social networks and embed it on blogs. “We’ve essentially taken a children’s publishing imprint, put it on the web and turned it into social software,” Ury told me.

Initially, Ury and his cofounder, Kaye Puhlmann (both formerly consumer experience designers for digital ad agencies; Ury has worked with clients like Apple, Nike and Starbucks), imagined that families would be the primary users of the site. “Parents reading on the iPad to their kids in bed,” Ury said. Parents and kids are indeed using Storybird — “and a lot of people create stories almost as extended greeting cards,” Ury said — but it turns out the largest demographic is teachers and students. Over 125,000 schools are now on Storybird, with teachers issuing assignments to students and using the site in the classroom to help kids with their writing skills. The most recent demographic — and “the most voracious,” according to Ury — is teen and tween girls. “They are using it for what I’d almost call conversation and communication,” he added, sharing images and messages with each other online “the same way you might use Tumblr.”

Indeed, former Tumblr president John Maloney was one of Storybird’s first funders and is now also an advisor. The company raised $850,000 in seed funding last year from Learn Capital, High Line Ventures, Index Ventures and Maloney. Storybird used the funding to relaunch the site in HTML5 and to add staff.

Storybird operates on a freemium model, selling memberships to teachers and individuals. Teachers can sign up for Storybird Pro memberships, starting at $69 a year, that give them more classroom tools and support a larger number of students. (A free teacher membership includes 75 student accounts and lets kids create an unlimited number of books.) Individuals can opt for membership ($9 a month or $59 a year), which entitles them to free PDF downloads of their books, custom covers and other perks. Otherwise, it’s $1.99 to download a story as a PDF. Users can also order a print version of their book, starting at $13.95 for a two-page paperback (and ranging up to $43.95 for a 24-page premium hardcover).

 A “consumer connection” for artists

Paul McDougall http://storybird.com/paulmcdougall/

Users can’t upload their own art to Storybird. All of the art on the site is professionally created, and that’s intentional. Ury said he initially thought about a site for collaborative storytelling, where one user would draw and the other would write, but quickly realized that “asking one party to draw was going to be ridiculous,” because most people just aren’t very good artists. He and Puhlmann instead decided to tap the professional artists, illustrators and animators they’d worked with at previous jobs. “Some of these guys have no consumer connection,” Ury said. “We could use that.” The artists upload their work to Storybird for free, and Storybird links back to their Etsy shops and personal websites. Storybird also pays authors royalties when users download or print their creations.

A few Storybird artists are now making “hobby money” from the site — $5,000 to $10,000 a year, Ury said. But Storybird is also driving “millions of visits” to the artists’ websites and Etsy pages.

What’s next: Poetry, long-form and “a new approach to revenue”

“We are to publishers what Android is to Microsoft,” Ury said. “Microsoft is about shrink-wrapped IP. With Android, the IP is free and they make money somewhere else. With Storybird, the IP on the platform is free” and the company will turn elsewhere for revenue: “We’ll charge you to be part of the community, as opposed to paying for reading and writing.” Hence the memberships for individuals and teachers.

Irisz Agocs http://storybird.com/iriszagocs/

Storybird is considering tip jars for artists, or paywalls, to certain content — “some way, where, as the artist starts to grow, they can create a different approach to revenue.” But Ury’s not yet sure how that will look. And if the content is monetized somehow, the writers present another problem. “We’re starting to see amateur writers who are just killing it, building up an audience and getting quite popular,” Ury said. “But an artist may have 10, 15, 20,000 people who’ve written stories with their artwork. We’re not sure how to commercialize that. We’re clearly brokering a relationship between the writer and the artist, but it’s by proxy.”

That’s a difference between Storybird and completely text-based community writing sites like Wattpad (another Toronto-based company, which has about 10 million members). Some Wattpad authors have gotten traditional book deals, but on Storybird, multiple authors are working with the same art, and it’s not clear yet if just one person can be an “ambassador” of a certain set of artwork.

In 2013, Storybird plans to expand to other form factors, including poetry and longer works. For now, the company will remain web-based. “I don’t like the fragmentation of Android and I’m not crazy about what’s going on with Apple,” Ury said. “I feel strongly — and the more I talk to developers and investors, it’s borne out — that staying on the web and working with the power of the link has allowed us to grow in a way that you just can’t do through the app marketplace. It’s a nightmare dealing with apps in schools” and libraries and schools remain “a really big way that we grow.” For now, the HTML5 site looks good on iPad.

Moving into 2014, “what happens if Storybird tries to play a cultural role beyond the platform?” Ury wondered. “We could be the next multimedia platform for an author or artist. We could incubate the next animated series.”