CNN has announced it is purchasing Zite, the personalized news-reading app for the iPad, for at least $20 million. I have used this app from time to time myself and found it rather useful in picking up stories that my RSS trawls miss. CNN has said it plans to run Zite as an independent business, and promote it on its website and television programs.
The free app will not contain advertisements “at first”, and will be developed for other OSes though iOS will remain its primary platform. The app’s real strength might be in being able to provide demographic data on its users’ interests, which could be very helpful to any marketing efforts CNN might make.
When it originally launched, Zite drew a number of complaints from the news sites whose content it aggregated, and responded by adapting a more web-based view for those sites.
