Instapaper is independent again 2 years after Pinterest acquisition

Bookmarking service Instapaper is unpinning itself from Pinterest, two years after being acquired by the social media giant.

In a blog post, the Instapaper team announced that it is establishing a new company, Instant Paper, Inc., that Pinterest will then transfer ownership of Instapaper to in three weeks.

No specific reason was given for the transfer of ownership. Instapaper thanked Pinterest for helping the team optimize search and create an extension for Firefox, among other improvements. The Instapaper team also said that there aren’t many changes currently planned for the product, though it did say on Twitter that it was working to get the product back up in Europe, where it’s been shut down since the implementation of GDPR.

Created by Tumblr cofounder Marco Arment in 2008, Instapaper was first acquired by New York startup studio Betaworks before joining Pinterest. Its app is available for iOS, Android, and Kindle users to bookmark articles to read when they’re offline. When Instapaper announced its acquisition by Pinterest in August 2016, the company said that it would be working with Pinterest to find new uses for its parsing technology with Rich Pins, Pins that show more context about a product or topic than usual.

The acquisition histories of social media giants are littered with tales of now-defunct apps. Just earlier this month, Facebook announced it was shutting down three apps it had previously acquired in one fell swoop — Hello, tbh, and Moves. It likely helped that Pinterest acquired both the technology and the majority of the Instapaper team, who could advocate for the app to regain its independence and live on.