Die Initiative Let’s Encrypt schaut auf das Jahr 2016 zurück und ist mit dem ersten vollen Jahr im Produktivbetrieb zufrieden, auch wenn es einige Probleme gab. (Let's Encrypt, WordPress)
Quelle: Golem
Google's self-driving car company, Waymo, has been quietly manufacturing its own sensors, radars, and vision system for its vehicles – hardware that will hit the streets on Waymo&039;s 100 new Pacifica minivans later this month, its chief executive John Krafcik announced Sunday.
Krafcik said building the hardware in-house, in addition to its self-driving software, has brought down costs and increased reliability.
The company&039;s own laser systems, for example, cost 90% less than the comparable $75,000 product LiDar from a supplier.
“We’re mastering the hardware and software to build a better driver for a truly self-driving car,” Kracfik said.
The Pacificas will launch in Arizona and California this month.
Krafcik also said the company has seen an improvement in the performance of its self-driving vehicles, which have traveled nearly 2.5 million miles.
He said that in 2015 Waymo test drivers turned off self-driving and took over control manually at a rate of 0.8 times per thousand miles. In 2016, that rate shrank to 0.2 disengagements per thousand miles.
Krafcik&039;s announcement at Detroit&039;s annual auto show on Sunday comes one month after Google parent Alphabet spun out its self-driving car program into a new company called Waymo.
Last month, the company also announced that it had completed a fully autonomous drive in Austin, Texas, in 2015 – a drive with a blind passenger in the back of a vehicle.
Meanwhile, Uber&039;s self-driving car program, which launched in Pittsburgh in September, has hit some road blocks.
The ride-hail giant was forced by California regulators to shut down its self-driving pilot program in San Francisco just days after it launched.
LINK: Google Parent Alphabet Spins Out Self-Driving Car Company As Waymo
Quelle: <a href="Google&039;s Self-Driving Car Company Has Been Quietly Building Its Own Hardware“>BuzzFeed
Auch im neuen Jahr gibt es natürlich wieder Neues aus Nerdistan. Im aktuellen c't uplink sprechen wir über Handys aus China, den Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg und Mainboards mit Intels neuer Prozessorgeneration.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
Lyft Co-founder John Zimmer
John Sciulli / Getty Images
As the calendar got ready to flip to 2017 this past Saturday, Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer got behind the wheel of a white Chevrolet Equinox and turned on his app’s “Driver’s mode.” For four years running, Zimmer has taken a Lyft shift driving San Francisco’s revelers across town on New Year’s Eve. It was time to get back in action.
Lyft had a busy 2016. It started the year by raising $1 billion from a group led by General Motors, though that wasn’t enough to significantly cut into Uber’s almost $7 billion funding lead. Later, it was rumored to be for sale, but said it was instead approached by potential buyers it turned down. And its role as a network connecting cars and passengers became more intriguing with the emergence of automated driving, a development that could make Lyft emerge as the software directing these robot-driven cars to pickups and dropoffs, and will likely bring along more competitors.
I was Zimmer’s first pickup of the night, as I had been a year prior, giving us plenty to catch up on. Almost as soon I uttered my first question, Zimmer got a pickup request, and we were off to the races.
Lyft
When Zimmer told his second pickup of the night, Miranda, that her ride was free, she celebrated by asking him to play Shaggy on the car’s speakers. Zimmer obliged, and when “Angel” came on, the already festive mood turned really festive.
You can tell Zimmer enjoys giving these rides, which is ironic, given that his company’s future may not include human drivers. At the start of 2016, autonomous vehicles were still abstract; much hyped but little used in the real world. By the end of the year, autonomous driving became much more real when Uber’s self-driving cars hit the streets of Pittsburgh and San Francisco (at least temporarily), and the company’s autonomous truck made its first delivery.
Lyft is getting in on the self-driving action too. This year, it plans to introduce autonomous driving cars along some fixed routes, according to a blog post Zimmer penned in September. And within five years, Lyft expects that a fleet of autonomous cars will handle the majority of its rides in the US.
But Zimmer cautioned me not to relegate Lyft’s 700,000 or so human drivers to the unemployment line just yet. There should still be work for them when the cars drive themselves, he explained. “In my mind these automated vehicles are more like rooms on wheels,” Zimmer said. “It could be a social experience, it could be a movie theatre on wheels, it could be a bar on wheels. There will be people that we need to provide those services.”
In the near term, Zimmer said, Lyft is still trying to recruit more human drivers. Today, only a minuscule percentage of miles traveled in the US are in Lyfts and Ubers, Zimmer said, and if his company can convince people to ditch their cars in favor of ride hailing, it could create more work for drivers, even if some of the routes are driven by robots.
What of Zimmer’s New Year’s Eve driving ritual though? “I enjoy it. It’s fun,” he told me. But in a few years? “Maybe then I’ll be your bartender.”
Lyft
After dropping off Miranda, Zimmer picked up a new passenger, Matthew, and began driving down the 101 highway towards San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The road ahead was clear, but it was hardly a metaphor for the competition and challenges Lyft is facing.
Five months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a ‘master plan’ for his company that teased the idea of turning self-driving Teslas into part time ride-hailing vehicles, which would put the car manufacturer squarely in competition with Lyft and Uber. Tesla isn’t the only car manufacturer going down this path. Last August, Ford said it too would develop autonomous vehicles and use them for ride hailing. Toyota, BMW, and other manufacturers have also expressed plans to develop self-driving cars.
Car manufacturers’ entry into ride hailing would pose major threats to Lyft: They can gain access to vehicles at a cheaper cost by producing them on their own, and in many cases they have relationships with customers that run deeper than the nascent ride hailing companies.
This doesn’t mean Lyft is toast. When autonomous cars go mainstream, Zimmer explained, there will be three components to the business: the cars themselves, the self-driving technology, and the networks they run on, like Uber and Lyft. Zimmer argued that the networks, which manage the movement of cars and relationships with customers, will be the most important of the three, noting that Lyft and Uber have a head start over new competitors.
“We know where the passengers are and where the demand is going,” Zimmer said. Lyft, he argued, could serve more people with fewer cars than newcomers because it knows where to position the cars to efficiently meet the demand. The long play for Lyft, Zimmer said, is to get people to give up car ownership in favor of Lyft subscriptions where they'd buy miles just like they buy minutes from cell providers. Autonomous cars could help take this from an unreasonable expense to a cheap enough alternative that it would demand serious consideration.
Lyft
Zimmer’s final pickup was Siaga, an American Airlines flight crew member in town for New Year’s who needed to get to H&M for an emergency New Year’s outfit. Siaga could splurge a bit since his ride was on Zimmer, placing him in a growing group of people who have had their rides subsidized by Lyft.
Lyft, according to Bloomberg, has promised investors to keep its losses below $150 million per quarter. And in December, a Bloomberg report stated that although Uber would make more than $5.5 billion in net revenue in 2016, it could lose $3 billion in the process. These reports led some to question whether ride hailing companies were real businesses, so I asked Zimmer if they were. He responded affirmatively.
“On a per-ride basis, rides are profitable,” Zimmer explained. The losses, he said, come from trying to win over new passengers (you may have seen people handing out $50 Lyft credits on a street near you — this is part of that effort). “Having a certain amount of scale is the early part of the business, but doing 17 million+ rides every month will lead us to a profitable business.” Lyft, he said, has tripled its number of rides since we met last year.
So when will Lyft be profitable? Zimmer wouldn’t say. But he said the company has a plan to use less money than it’s raised to get to profitability. “When you look at the unit economics per ride, there is a comfortable margin there that will allow us to cover all our expenses and become profitable.”
With that, it was my turn to be dropped off. Seems like Lyft is in good shape to be around next New Year&039;s Eve too, so we’ll pick this up then.
Quelle: <a href="Lyft Co-Founder John Zimmer Drives And Dishes On Automation, Car Subscriptions, And Cash“>BuzzFeed
Lyft Co-founder John Zimmer
John Sciulli / Getty Images
As the calendar got ready to flip to 2017 this past Saturday, Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer got behind the wheel of a white Chevrolet Equinox and turned on his app’s “Driver’s mode.” For four years running, Zimmer has taken a Lyft shift driving San Francisco’s revelers across town on New Year’s Eve. It was time to get back in action.
Lyft had a busy 2016. It started the year by raising $1 billion from a group led by General Motors, though that wasn’t enough to significantly cut into Uber’s almost $7 billion funding lead. Later, it was rumored to be for sale, but said it was instead approached by potential buyers it turned down. And its role as a network connecting cars and passengers became more intriguing with the emergence of automated driving, a development that could make Lyft emerge as the software directing these robot-driven cars to pickups and dropoffs, and will likely bring along more competitors.
I was Zimmer’s first pickup of the night, as I had been a year prior, giving us plenty to catch up on. Almost as soon I uttered my first question, Zimmer got a pickup request, and we were off to the races.
Lyft
When Zimmer told his second pickup of the night, Miranda, that her ride was free, she celebrated by asking him to play Shaggy on the car’s speakers. Zimmer obliged, and when “Angel” came on, the already festive mood turned really festive.
You can tell Zimmer enjoys giving these rides, which is ironic, given that his company’s future may not include human drivers. At the start of 2016, autonomous vehicles were still abstract; much hyped but little used in the real world. By the end of the year, autonomous driving became much more real when Uber’s self-driving cars hit the streets of Pittsburgh and San Francisco (at least temporarily), and the company’s autonomous truck made its first delivery.
Lyft is getting in on the self-driving action too. This year, it plans to introduce autonomous driving cars along some fixed routes, according to a blog post Zimmer penned in September. And within five years, Lyft expects that a fleet of autonomous cars will handle the majority of its rides in the US.
But Zimmer cautioned me not to relegate Lyft’s 700,000 or so human drivers to the unemployment line just yet. There should still be work for them when the cars drive themselves, he explained. “In my mind these automated vehicles are more like rooms on wheels,” Zimmer said. “It could be a social experience, it could be a movie theatre on wheels, it could be a bar on wheels. There will be people that we need to provide those services.”
In the near term, Zimmer said, Lyft is still trying to recruit more human drivers. Today, only a minuscule percentage of miles traveled in the US are in Lyfts and Ubers, Zimmer said, and if his company can convince people to ditch their cars in favor of ride hailing, it could create more work for drivers, even if some of the routes are driven by robots.
What of Zimmer’s New Year’s Eve driving ritual though? “I enjoy it. It’s fun,” he told me. But in a few years? “Maybe then I’ll be your bartender.”
Lyft
After dropping off Miranda, Zimmer picked up a new passenger, Matthew, and began driving down the 101 highway towards San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The road ahead was clear, but it was hardly a metaphor for the competition and challenges Lyft is facing.
Five months ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a ‘master plan’ for his company that teased the idea of turning self-driving Teslas into part time ride-hailing vehicles, which would put the car manufacturer squarely in competition with Lyft and Uber. Tesla isn’t the only car manufacturer going down this path. Last August, Ford said it too would develop autonomous vehicles and use them for ride hailing. Toyota, BMW, and other manufacturers have also expressed plans to develop self-driving cars.
Car manufacturers’ entry into ride hailing would pose major threats to Lyft: They can gain access to vehicles at a cheaper cost by producing them on their own, and in many cases they have relationships with customers that run deeper than the nascent ride hailing companies.
This doesn’t mean Lyft is toast. When autonomous cars go mainstream, Zimmer explained, there will be three components to the business: the cars themselves, the self-driving technology, and the networks they run on, like Uber and Lyft. Zimmer argued that the networks, which manage the movement of cars and relationships with customers, will be the most important of the three, noting that Lyft and Uber have a head start over new competitors.
“We know where the passengers are and where the demand is going,” Zimmer said. Lyft, he argued, could serve more people with fewer cars than newcomers because it knows where to position the cars to efficiently meet the demand. The long play for Lyft, Zimmer said, is to get people to give up car ownership in favor of Lyft subscriptions where they'd buy miles just like they buy minutes from cell providers. Autonomous cars could help take this from an unreasonable expense to a cheap enough alternative that it would demand serious consideration.
Lyft
Zimmer’s final pickup was Siaga, an American Airlines flight crew member in town for New Year’s who needed to get to H&M for an emergency New Year’s outfit. Siaga could splurge a bit since his ride was on Zimmer, placing him in a growing group of people who have had their rides subsidized by Lyft.
Lyft, according to Bloomberg, has promised investors to keep its losses below $150 million per quarter. And in December, a Bloomberg report stated that although Uber would make more than $5.5 billion in net revenue in 2016, it could lose $3 billion in the process. These reports led some to question whether ride hailing companies were real businesses, so I asked Zimmer if they were. He responded affirmatively.
“On a per-ride basis, rides are profitable,” Zimmer explained. The losses, he said, come from trying to win over new passengers (you may have seen people handing out $50 Lyft credits on a street near you — this is part of that effort). “Having a certain amount of scale is the early part of the business, but doing 17 million+ rides every month will lead us to a profitable business.” Lyft, he said, has tripled its number of rides since we met last year.
So when will Lyft be profitable? Zimmer wouldn’t say. But he said the company has a plan to use less money than it’s raised to get to profitability. “When you look at the unit economics per ride, there is a comfortable margin there that will allow us to cover all our expenses and become profitable.”
With that, it was my turn to be dropped off. Seems like Lyft is in good shape to be around next New Year&039;s Eve too, so we’ll pick this up then.
Quelle: <a href="Lyft Co-Founder John Zimmer Drives And Dishes On Automation, Car Subscriptions, And Cash“>BuzzFeed
An FBI agent walks past revelers gathered in Times Square on New Year's Eve in New York, U.S. December 31, 2016. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith
Stephanie Keith / Reuters
WASHINGTON — The FBI alerted the Democratic National Committee as recently as New Year’s Eve that hackers were once again trying to break into their computer systems, BuzzFeed News has learned.
“There was activity the day after the president issued sanctions [against Russia], looking for ways to get into the servers,” one high-level source familiar with the investigation said.
A US intelligence officer, who requested anonymity as they were not cleared to speak to the press, said that there have been “multiple attempts” to hack into the DNC since the Nov. 8 elections.
“Many of these attempts are not serious… hackers are trying to re-enter the DNC system but as far as we understand their attempts have not been successful,” said the intelligence officer, who had been in contact with the DNC over the attempts.
Neither offered an explanation for who was behind the intrusion attempts or details about the targeted systems.
Crowdstrike, a private cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the original breach that saw thousands of emails of top Democratic Party members hacked and then made public, has also been helping the DNC secure their networks against future cyberattacks.
The Obama administration announced sweeping retaliations against Russian diplomats and intelligence officials on Dec. 29 for what the intelligence community says was a widespread influence operation designed to undermine the US election. The Russian effort included accessing the DNC’s system and using Wikileaks to distribute the contents of sensitive emails, according to US intelligence community analysis. The same day the sanctions were announced, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a public report blaming Moscow for cyberattacks against DNC computer systems as far back as 2015. Those cyberattacks, and the subsequent release of stolen DNC emails, crippled the party on the eve of its June convention and rattled Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects through November.
The intelligence community’s analysis says the Kremlin’s influence measures were intended to bolster now President-elect Donald Trump’s run for office.
The ongoing FBI investigation into the DNC server hack came under sharp scrutiny this week when BuzzFeed News revealed the Bureau had never independently accessed or analyzed the committee’s hacked servers. The DNC originally said that was because the FBI never asked; the FBI later said it had asked and been rebuffed by DNC officials.
DNC officials tried to downplay the public disagreement Friday to BuzzFeed News, saying it was likely a miscommunication between the two entities.
The FBI investigation into the cyberattacks is ongoing.
Quelle: <a href="Hackers Tried To Break Into DNC Computers Right Before New Year’s Eve“>BuzzFeed
Mark Wilson / Getty Images
The Internet Archive, a publicly accessible repository of digital records based in San Francisco, has opened the gates to their Trump Archive, which includes nearly 750 televised speeches given by the president-elect.
The collection includes speeches and appearances dating back to 2009; it's been closed captioned, so you can search through it using keywords. The Archive plans to keep it updated throughout Trump&039;s presidency.
The Archive wrote in a statement that it “hopes to make it more efficient for the media, researchers, and the public to track Trump’s statements while fact-checking and reporting on the new administration.” Its archive includes 500 videos checked for accuracy by Politifact, the Washington Post, and factcheck.org. The Internet Archive previously built an archive of political TV ads, which lives within its TV News Archive, as does the Trump trove.
It also hopes people will use the archive for “any creative use: comedy, art, documentaries, wherever people’s inspiration takes them.” You can cut clips together using an editor within the archive. The archive&039;s creators call it “Popcorn.”
In the near future, you may see another archive that focuses on Trump&039;s cabinet or Paul Ryan&039;s televised appearances. The Internet Archive is considering building other such databases. It said in a statement, “We consider the Trump Archive to be an experimental model for creating similar archives for other public officials.”
Because the Trump Archive is largely hand-curated from the Internet Archive&039;s trove of 1.3 million television clips, the organization is hoping to collaborate with artificial intelligence companies to more efficiently create searchable databases about public officials by recognizing faces and voices. Around five Internet Archive staff members created the Trump Archive over the course of a week and a half, according to Roger Macdonald, manager of the TV Archive.
Macdonald said the curators focused on fact-checking for the archive because “fact-checking is a great signal that there’s some element of a speech that’s of import to news or in the public interest.” The archive&039;s staff used the same approach when curating its collection of Political TV.
The history of the internet is fragile and a Google search won&039;t always bring up what you need, which makes archives like this one so useful. The Internet Archive&039;s most well-known product, the Wayback Machine, preserves websites even after they are deleted.
Quelle: <a href="You Can Now Watch 520 Hours Of Trump Speeches In One Place“>BuzzFeed
Counsyl's founders
Counsyl
DNA-testing startup Counsyl said Friday that is laying off part of its sales team, or about 5% of its workforce.
The 24 salespeople were tasked with promoting the startup&039;s cancer-screening test, which detects your risk for breast, ovarian, colon, and other cancers, to doctors, the company confirmed to BuzzFeed News. The layoffs suggest that sales may have been sluggish.
Counsyl, which has raised more than $100 million from investors that include Peter Thiel&039;s fund, also sells genetic tests for aspiring parents who want to learn if their offspring might be at risk of inheriting diseases, and for pregnant mothers.
Counsyl&039;s existing salesforce will continue to sell the cancer test along with the other tests, the company said, but will “strengthen its focus” on its women&039;s health tests.
Last year, Counsyl laid off 27 employees in sales support, design, marketing, and engineering from what was then a 400-person workforce, as BuzzFeed News reported then.
Counsyl also said Friday that it has screened more than 700,000 patients, identified more than 8,000 couples at risk of passing inherited genetic disorders to their children, and provided over 54,000 genetic counseling sessions to patients.
Quelle: <a href="DNA-Testing Startup Counsyl Lays Off 5% Of Its Workforce“>BuzzFeed
Samsung's costly and embarrassing recall of its flagship Galaxy Note7 smartphone last year tarnished the company&039;s reputation, but it hasn&039;t really hurt its bottom line. Samsung&039;s Q4 2016 profits grew nearly 50% from Q4 2015, according to a statement from the company.
Samsung&039;s Q3 profits did take a hit after it was forced to issue a wide-ranging recall of 2.5 million Note7 phones because some were catching fire and exploding. The company lost $25 billion in market share over the debacle — roughly the entire value of Hewlett-Packard. But even that combined with the Q4 recall of 2.8 million of its smart washing machines, which were also exploding, did not seem to have made a dent in Samsung&039;s overall profits.
Samsung is worth $216 billion, according to Forbes, and sells everything from life insurance to semiconductors. It&039;s considered one of the pillars of the South Korean economy. Though mobile phones are one of its most visible products, especially in the West, they are not its only moneymaker.
Professor Jinsuh Lee of Purdue&039;s Krannert School of Management, who previously worked at Samsung Electronics, told BuzzFeed News, “The Note7 is part of the mobile division, but what led to the growth is the semiconductor division. They’re related, but if you’re looking at the whole picture, the mobile division can still have a bad quarter or two while semiconductors can continue to grow.”
“Semiconductors are in high demand now because of the growth of mobile products across the world, especially in China. There are only a handful of companies that can produce them at that scale, Samsung is one of them. They’re getting the major benefit from the market increase.”
Reuters reports that strong sales of chips, data storage products, and smartphone components, as well as a rebound in sales of Samsung&039;s other smartphones boosted the company to its strongest quarter since Q3 2013.
Samsung had another win in 2016: It avoided a costly verdict when the US Supreme Court sided with it over Apple in a lawsuit alleging that Samsung copied elements of the iPhone&039;s design. Apple was suing for $400 million.
Samsung did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Quelle: <a href="What Note7 Recall? Samsung&039;s Profits Are The Best They&039;ve Been In Years“>BuzzFeed
Via Medium
Like most of its publishers, Kelley Calkins learned of Medium’s decision to lay off staff and upend its ad business via a blog post, with no advance warning.
But unlike the rest of Medium’s publishers, Calkins was — at the moment she learned of the company’s upheaval — in the middle of migrating her site to its platform.
“The timing was just absolutely incredible,” Calkins told BuzzFeed News. “I was scrolling through Twitter and saw [Medium founder and CEO] Ev Williams’ post.” That post, which reportedly caught even some of Medium’s biggest publishing partners by surprise (neither Williams or Medium’s official Twitter account tweeted the blog post), announced the company was laying off 50 employees, closing down its New York and Washington, DC offices, and changing its business strategy. In the post Williams called the ad-supported business model on which Medium relied “a broken system.”
Calkins — a founder of the women’s publication, The Establishment — and her team had been working to launch their site on Medium since July. They'd been enticed by Medium&039;s sleek design features and the publications the company had wooed to its platform; In the spring of 2016, Medium began hosting popular third-party sites like The Ringer, ThinkProgress, and The Awl. They were dumbfounded by company&039;s announcement. “We read it in this kind of shock,” said Calkins. “There were some expletives involved.”
A person familiar with Medium&039;s operations told BuzzFeed News that the company contacted all partner publishers the day of the announcement — including the Establishment — offering technical support, explanations about the fate of Promoted Stories, and reassurances that its Memberships subscription model is still in place for publishers.
Medium has “renewed its focus,” toward publishers before. The company debuted in 2012 as a sleeker blogging tool, but soon began commissioning stories from name-brand writers. Throughout 2013 and 2014, Medium added a stable of well-respected writers and acquired publications like Matter, which won a National Magazine Award for its long-form work in 2016.
But while well-funded, Williams’ vision for Medium has been largely inconsistent and opaque, leaving employees and content creators struggling to keep up and, in some cases, keep their jobs. In 2015, for example, Williams decided to reconsider Medium’s crucial TTR (total time reading) metric — one of the main ways it paid its writers. At the time the shift was intended to recast Medium as a sort of social network for readers and writers, but writers feared it would lead to layoffs. Not long after the move, Medium paired down its in-house editorial operation significantly. It spun off Matter and ended a number of contracts with writers and publications, including the political cartoon and illustration publication, The Nib, which published a cartoon this morning about Williams&039; announcement.
“We were dubious about going to Medium precisely because of its history of flip-flopping on its strategy,” Calkins said. “But they had a convincing pitch that they were going to bolster the publishing industry, and that commitment was meaningful to me.”
On Wednesday morning, when when it came time for The Establishment to go live on Medium, Calkins found she had trouble reaching typically responsive Medium staffers; they were being briefed on the bad news the company would soon announce. Calkins was contacted by a Medium rep later in the day, but by that time the news that the company was changing its business model was already public. And since the site’s URL was in the process of migrating, The Establishment officially launched on Medium a few hours after Williams’ blog post.
“Some of the Medium staffers who&039;d initially approached us and who we worked with reached out to us personally to say they felt terrible,” Calkins said. “They’d just heard and they&039;d lost their jobs. They were blindsided, too.”
For Calkins and The Establishment, the monetization programs that Medium shuttered were “played an essential role” in negotiations to migrate their site to the platform. “The monetization packages they offered factored in hugely in our decision to migrate,” she said. “It was very appealing that we&039;d have to do nothing or next to nothing to finally get some revenue — we were supposed to have some revenue today through promoted story feature.” Theoretically, The Establishment would have started accumulating revenue as soon as it migrated to Medium&039;s platform, but the program was cut Wednesday.
Not all publishers echoed Calkins&039; disappointment. Sunil Rajaraman, the CEO of The Bold Italic, which migrated last year to Medium, penned a post with the title, “I Migrated My Publishing Property to Medium, and I am Not Freaked Out.” In the post, he denied that publishers were owed any advance warning on the changes. Rajaraman suggested that The Bold Italic never relied on Medium solely for revenue, calling the idea idiotic. “I guess my general lack of shock/surprise at the announcement is that I&039;ve dealt with multiple ad providers in the past,” he told BuzzFeed News. “My view is that any publication that was betting its revenue future on Medium could have had the same result if they bet their publication on any single ad provider that suddenly hit a brick wall.”
Calkins told BuzzFeed News that the decision to leaning on Medium for advertising revenue was a calculated risk, especially given that it&039;s Promoted Stories unit was still in beta. “However, as a small publisher with limited (wo)manpower and resources, the idea that we could start producing revenue on Day 1 with limited effort on our end was incredibly enticing,” she said. “We were also impressed by the high-quality sponsored content campaigns we&039;d seen on Medium (Sofitel&039;s partnership with The Billfold comes to mind) and were thrilled to be able to tap into an established network of advertisers through Medium.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, Calkins and her team say they&039;ve heard very little from Medium since the announcement. Williams wrote in his blog post that Medium was “shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people.” He added that it was “too soon to say exactly what this will look like.”
Calkins and The Establishment are still processing the unexpected news. They are also hoping for more transparency from Williams. But so far, they’re not getting it. “We&039;re still in contact with a point person over there but that&039;s just troubleshooting technical issues,” Calkins said. “We’ve heard nothing officially from the company about the future.”
Quelle: <a href="Medium’s “Renewed Focus” Left Some Publishers In The Dark“>BuzzFeed
