Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, January 5, 2017

• Medium says it can’t make money selling ads so it’s laying off a third of its staff: Medium CEO Ev Williams says his company’s ad-based business model isn’t working, and the startup is laying off 50 employees and closing its offices in New York and Washington, D.C., as a result. 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.” Medium simply grew too quickly, according to a person close to the company, and laying off 50 people is part of Medium’s plan to cut costs while it figures out what comes next. Medium has raised more than $130 million from a number of well-known investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Greylock and Spark Capital. Its most recent funding round, back in April, valued the company at more than $600 million.

• Apple pulls New York Times app from iTunes store in China: Apple, complying with what it said was a request from Chinese authorities, removed news apps created by The New York Times from its app store in China late last month. The move limits access to one of the few remaining channels for readers in mainland China to read The Times without resorting to special software. The government began blocking The Times’s websites in 2012, after a series of articles on the wealth amassed by the family of Wen Jiabao, who was then prime minister, but it had struggled in recent months to prevent readers from using the Chinese-language app.  Apple removed both the English-language and Chinese-language apps from the app store in China on Dec. 23. Apps from other international publications, including The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, were still available in the app store.