Developer Marco Arment announced in a blog post today that he has sold a majority stake of his read-later app Instapaper to Betaworks.
That company owns Bitly, Digg, Socialflow and a number of other products. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. 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.
Arment said he would like to work on other apps and creative projects, including The Magazine, his medium-form iPad magazine.
Instapaper is available for the iPhone and iPad for $3.99. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
He successfully found a new income stream with "The Magazine", got a large payday you can assume from the Instapaper sale, and has freed time and resources to persue more successful future app markets instead of plugging holes in a leaking one.
Wow, we can't get more superficial than this: Apps get popular mainly because of their names?
How do you get a 'name' and an app's 'name' if your app is crap?
Is your working hypothesis that Instapaper got famous by accident and that freak event at the beginning kept it famous for all those years?
It's too bad that more great apps, like Sparrow, for ex, don't get to grow and mature like Instapaper did. I think Marco did it well and did it right. Good for him to go and get paid!