DragonI

Medium says it can’t make money selling ads so it’s laying off a third of its staff

Medium is laying off 50 people and changing its business model.

www.recode.net|Kurt Wagner

That’s about one third of the company’s employees.

In a blog post shared on Wednesday, Williams said he wants to move away from ad-supported content, which is how most stuff on the internet generates revenue. Williams described that business model, which is almost entirely dependent on clicks and views, as a “broken system.”

“The vast majority of articles, videos, and other ‘content’ we all consume on a daily basis is paid for  —  directly or indirectly —  by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals,” Williams wrote. “And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result, we get … well, what we get. And it’s getting worse.”

So if ad-supported content is no good, what will Medium do instead? Williams hasn’t decided.

Medium, the publishing platform started by one of Twitter's cofounders, is gutting some of its most popular sites

Big changes are happening at the site started by Ev Williams.

www.businessinsider.com|Cale Guthrie Weissman,

Medium now wants to become more of a social network rather than a publishing platform. But this comes at a great cost to its full-time and freelance staff, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

"Medium is not a publishing tool," CEO Ev Williams wrote in the announcement. "It's a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs."

Medium 1.0

medium.com

Last year, we set out on a mission to build a new publishing platform from scratch — a place that allowed anyone to easily share stories and ideas that mattered to them and influenced others.

One of our goals was to make it dead simple to write and present a beautiful story without having to be a designer or programmer. We also sought to help great ideas quickly find the right audience — no matter who they came from.

Recently, after months of testing and tweaking, we opened the doors so anyone could publish on Medium.

Today, we’re launching a set of major improvements. We’re calling it “Medium 1.0.”

With 1.0, we’ve redesigned the reading and writing experience to make your stories look better and have more impact. We’ve also changed how collections work to enable curation and improve discoverability.