(2017-03-15) Genius Com Layoffs

Genius.com laid off a third of its staff, with the bulk of the cuts coming from the engineering department

shift its emphasis away from the Annotation platform that once attracted top-tier investors in favor of becoming a more video-focused media company.

other news organizations are building similar features of their own. NPR has created an annotator that places notes in the body of the text — and the LA Times has considered using that tool as well, a spokeswoman said. The nonprofit organization OpenNews has built an open-source tool of its own for newsrooms to use.

Though the Genius has had a chief revenue officer and a vice president of partnerships, it only recently announced its first jobs in sales.

the company began testing a tool called the web annotator, which allowed anyone to add genius.it/ before any URL and then highlight and annotate text.

the number of people who annotate a post on Genius each month is now at 10,000, up 30 percent from the start of the year.

But the biggest problem with the annotator from Genius’ perspective is that few individuals are using it. After more than two years of development, the Chrome extension has only 12,320 users.