Medium CEO Ev Williams announced on Wednesday that the popular San Francisco-based publishing platform will be shutting down both its New York City and Washington, D.C., offices, laying off 50 people, or a third of its staff, in an effort to restructure the platform. He, of course, made the announcement via a Medium post.
"While we could continue on our current path — and there is a business case for doing so — we decided that we risk failing on our larger, original mission if we don’t make some proactive changes while we have the momentum and resources to do so," Williams wrote.
Williams writes that the layoffs are mostly in the sales, support and other business roles. A Medium spokesperson declined to comment on the timeline of the office closures and on how many of the 50 employees are based in D.C. Williams also wrote that while the official offices will be shut down, employees may continue to work remotely from both NYC and D.C.
Medium was founded in 2011 in San Francisco, where its headquarters is still located. To date, the startup has raised $132 million, closing a $50 million Series C round in April.
In the past year, Williams says the platform has grown readership 300 percent year over year. However, that growth comes with growing pains, such as the one announced today. In 2016, Medium invested more in bringing more traditional online publishers to the platform (such as Mother Jones, The Awl, Pacific Standard magazine, Femsplain), and with that, they built what they thought was a transformative advertising model so they could properly pay the publishers using their platform for their content. However, Williams said that while the advertising model they created was better than what readers were used to, it wasn't the transformative model they wanted.
Hence the layoffs, the closures and the restructuring.
"We decided we needed to take a different — and bolder — approach to this problem," Williams wrote. "We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention."
The company isn't entirely sure what their new advertising model will look like. Williams also said executives who were brought onto the Medium team to scale the teams affected will also be laid off. The majority of the product development and engineering teams will remain at the company.
Note: This post was been updated after a Medium spokesperson declined to comment on the timeline of the closures and how many of the 50 layoffs were from the D.C. office.
Image used via CCO Public Domain — credit Startup Stock Photos
