YouTube will let bigot monetize if he removes link to homophobic merch
YouTube has made the weakest, least courageous response to mass backlash regarding its ruling yesterday that right-wing personality Steven Crowder’s racist and homophobic attacks on Vox video producer Carlos Maza didn’t violate its policies. Now YouTube says it’s demonetized Crowder’s channel because his “pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community” …but it will restore Crowder’s ability to earn a cut of YouTube ad revenue as long as he removes the link in his videos/channel to his offensive merchandise shop and fixes “all of the issues” with his channel. Specifically, Crowder’s shop sells [Warning: disturbing language not condoned by TechCrunch] “Socialism is for f*gs” t-shirts, baby onesies and beer-pong cups.
[Update: In the wake of this article and YouTube’s focus on his homophobic slur shirts, Crowder has removed the hateful merchandise from his store.]
The unwillingness to remove Crowder from YouTube counters the frequent calls by conservative politicians and pundits that they’re discriminated against on social media. Instead, it seems YouTube is too scared of being called bias to do what’s right and enforce its policies that dictate Crowder’s content or whole channel be removed. And even if Crowder does make YouTube’s required fixes, which it’s yet to publicly detail, he can still toe the line of its hate speech policies while promoting his merchandise shop within his videos.
To clarify, in order to reinstate monetization on this channel, he will need to remove the link to his T-shirts.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 5, 2019
Sorry for the confusion, we were responding to your tweets about the T-shirts. Again, this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 5, 2019
YouTube needs to completely rethink its approach to policy and enforcement here. Otherwise it’s likely to embolden harassers and bigots across the internet.
For those just stumbling into this social media policy dumpster fire, Canadia-American conservative commentator Crowder publishes politically inflammatory videos to his 3.8 million YouTube subscribers. They often include hosting bad faith “debates” with those who disagree with him, where he uses twisted rhetoric, aggression and obstinance to goad guests into getting angry so he can paint them as crazy and wrong. He’s also known for targeting specific media figures with verbal abuse, which leads his followers to harass them in en masse.
In this case, Crowder called Vox’s Maza a “gay Mexican” and “lispy queer,” amongst other hate speech-laden taunts across multiple videos. Last week Maza compiled a viral Twitter thread detailing the abuse and imploring YouTube to enforce its policy that bans hate speech and harassment.
Yesterday, YouTube tweeted its confusing and contradictory ruling from a review of Crowder’s videos. “While we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies . . . As an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone–from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts–to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies. Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site . . . Even if a video remains on our site, it doesn’t mean we endorse/support that viewpoint.”
That makes zero sense considering YouTube’s policy expressly forbids this kind of content, and says it will be taken down. YouTube specifically bans content that’s deliberately meant to “humiliate someone,” that includes “hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person” or features hate speech regarding “ethnicity” and “sexual orientation.” Crowder’s content violates all of these rules, and so consistent enforcement would require its removal.
That’s why the public momentarily applauded today when YouTube announced that it suspended Crowder’s monetization. This still fell far short of what YouTube’s policies dictate, but it at least meant that Crowder couldn’t monetize his YouTube views directly, even if he could still promote his merchandise, live events and Patreo-paid subscription page. Then the internet got rightfully mad again when YouTube said he just had to remove the link to his homophobic t-shirt shop to regain monetization, given he could just promote the shop in his videos while still benefiting from his YouTube reach.
And then just as this article was published, YouTube made yet another flip-flop and apologized for all the confusion (that it caused by waffling). It now claims that “this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.” Yet YouTube did not respond to a request for details about exactly what must be changed.
At least in the wake of this article and YouTube’s insistence he delink offensive merch from his channel, Crowder has removed the “Socialism is for f*gs” merchandise from his shop. But he’s sure to find new ways to stoke his hateful base while avoiding a full YouTube suspension.
Crowder repeatedly links his YouTube channel and videos to his merchandise shop selling shirts featuring homophobic slurs
It’s tough to even know where to begin criticism of YouTube’s behavior here:
- YouTube ignored Crowder’s abuse of Maza and others for years while earning money from a hateful audience
- It only took a closer look after Maza’s thorough exposé on abuse from Crowder received 20,000 retweets and got media attention
- YouTube claimed that “while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies,” despite clearly violating its policies
- The company had the gall to put out a blog post about its “ongoing work to tackle hate” without any reference to the Maza situation
- A day after saying he didn’t violate policy, YouTube reversed itself and claimed Crowder did violate policies; however, he’s only getting demonetized, some believe because he’s popular, brings his fans to YouTube and Google might face allegations of anti-conservative bias if it suspended him
- YouTube repeatedly refused to be transparent about why Crowder’s content was or wasn’t in violation of its policies, or what he’d need to change to be remonetized; it has refused to put anyone on the record, and even emailed responses to our press inquiries were answered by an anonymous Google Press email account
- YouTube has not made any statement about ceasing to recommend Crowder’s videos in its algorithm, which has been repeatedly shown to radicalize people by showing them more and more extreme fringe content
Hopefully this will be a turning point in news coverage and public perception of Google and YouTube. Facebook’s spread of misinformation and Twitter’s failure to police harassment have dominated the conversation of social media’s dangers to society. But it’s YouTube that willfully suggests the most salacious and eye-catching content to users to keep them watching ads, even if it’s promoting bigotry. And since it pays stars directly, unlike Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, it’s uniquely responsible for creating a profession out of hatred.
Perhaps this situation will lead to more calls from viewers and advertisers to #BoycottYouTube. But if members of the tech community really want to drive change, they should message their friends who work at YouTube or Google and ask why they work at a company that operates this way. That monetizes harassment and radicalization while refusing to take a strong stand against it. When backlash hits not just pecks at Google’s profits but harms its recruiting efforts in a brutally competitive talent market, that’s when we might finally see it do the right thing.
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Google offers new treasure trove of air quality data to researchers
Google has employed its network of street-view vehicles to also measure street-level air quality in recent years, through an initiative it calls “Project Air View.” Today, it’s making available to scientists and researcher organizations more of the resulting data from that ongoing initiative. The company is releasing an updated version of its air quality data set that includes information collected with partner Aclima’s environmental sensors gathered between 2017 and 2018.
The combined data cache includes info from the SF Bay and San Joaquin Valley area, originally starting in 2016, along with the additional two years’ worth of data for those areas as well as for other parts of California, and other major cities, including Houston, Salt Lake City, Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam.
All told, Google’s mapping data set for air quality now includes info covering more than 140,000 miles and 7,000 hours of combined driving time spanning 2016 through 2018. That’s a significant base upon which to build a study of the trajectory of air quality changes over time, and Google plans to not only continue this program, but expand it with additional coverage for more cities globally, including in Asia, Africa and South America.
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What to expect from E3 2019
E3 2019 is shaping up to be a bit of an in-between year. Nintendo Switch sales have finally started slowing, but the company’s a ways off from its next-generation console. Microsoft and Sony will be offering info on theirs soon, but we likely won’t be seeing much — especially from the latter, which has opted to sit out this show altogether.
Still, there will be plenty to see next week in Los Angeles. Here’s what we expect so far.
Microsoft: Google, of all companies, made the biggest splash at GDC back in March, announcing Stadia, its live-streaming gaming service. Look for Microsoft to hit back this week, with a lot more information surrounding its competitor, Project xCloud. We have even fewer details about Microsoft’s offering, though the company has compared it to music streaming services like Spotify.
We could get a glimpse of some next-generation hardware at the event, as well, though that’s likely to amount to little more than a brief sneak peek. We will, however, be getting a good look at Gears 5, the latest entry in one of the console’s most beloved franchises. The new title, which debuted onstage this time last year, is expected to be a major departure for the series.
Speaking of beloved franchises, look for some gameplay time with Halo: Infinite. So far, we’ve got little info on the Xbox/Windows 10 title beyond a mysterious trailer. Look for more than a dozen titles in all, including Age of Empires and a new Fable.
Nintendo: With a June 28 release date, there won’t be many surprises left for Super Mario Maker 2 by the time E3 rolls around. Pokémon Sword / Shield, too, will also be pretty well-highlighted ahead of the show. The upcoming Animal Crossing Switch title seems like a pretty good bet. Also be on the lookout for Luigi’s Mansion 3, Fire Emblem Three Houses and the Switch version of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Sony: Nothing.
Seriously, nothing.
We know the PlayStation 5 is just around the corner. E3 would be a great time to offer some insight into the company’s next-generation console, but Sony has opted to sit this one out instead. The gaming giant’s absence will loom large over the event, leaving Microsoft as the only member of the big three with an actual in-person press conference, after years of Nintendo Treehouses.
E3 has traditionally been a show that’s ebbed and flowed more than most, but the gaming giant’s decision will no doubt leave many wondering whether the event has lost some of its relevance in the age of doing everything online.
Publishers: Marvel’s Avengers is going to be a huge one from RPG stalwarts Square Enix. We’ve heard very little about the eagerly awaited title. A since-removed event synopsis described the Marvel game as, “an epic action-adventure that combines cinematic storytelling with continuous single-player and co-operative gameplay.” The game will be sharing a stage with the upcoming Final Fantasy VII remake.
As for Ubisoft, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Rainbow Six Siege and Tom Clancy’s The Division are all on tap. Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein: Youngblood are the big titles for Bethesda this year, plus Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 updates.
The show kicks off Sunday with Microsoft’s press conference. TechCrunch will be there all week.
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This year’s Computex was a wild ride with dueling chip releases, new laptops and 467 startups
After a relatively quiet show last year, Computex picked up the pace this year, with dueling chip launches by rivals AMD and Intel and a slew of laptop releases from Asus, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Lenovo and other companies.
Founded in 1981, the trade show, which took place last week from May 28 to June 1, is one of the ICT industry’s largest gatherings of OEMs and ODMs. In recent years, the show’s purview has widened, thanks to efforts by its organizers, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, to attract two groups: high-end computer customers, such as hardcore gamers, and startups looking for investors and business partners. This makes for a larger, more diverse and livelier show. Computex’s organizers said this year’s event attracted 42,000 international visitors, a new record.
Though the worldwide PC market continues to see slow growth, demand for high-performance computers is still being driven by gamers and the popularity of esports and live-streaming sites like Twitch. Computex, with its large, elaborate booths run by brands like Asus’ Republic of Gaming, is a popular destination for many gamers (the show is open to the public, with tickets costing NTD $200, or about $6.40), and began hosting esport competitions a few years ago.
The timing of the show, formally known as the Taipei International Information Technology Show, at the end of May or beginning of June each year, also gives companies a chance to debut products they teased at CES or preview releases for other shows later in the year, including E3 and IFA.
One difference between Computex now and ten (or maybe even just five) years ago is that the increasing accessibility of high-end PCs means many customers keep a close eye on major announcements by companies like AMD, Intel and Nvidia, not only to see when more powerful processors will be available but also because of potential pricing wars. For example, many gamers hope competition from new graphic processor units from AMD will force Nvidia to bring down prices on its popular but expensive GPUs.
The Battle of the Chips
The biggest news at this year’s Computex was the intense rivalry between AMD and Intel, whose keynote presentations came after a very different twelve months for the two competitors.
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Netflix tests an Instagram Stories-like feed called ‘Extras’ in its app
Netflix is testing a new way to help users find something to watch and stay connected with favorite shows with the introduction of an “Extras” tab in its mobile app. The tab, spotted first by Variety, is only a test at this time and is not showing to all users.
If you are in the test group, you’ll see a new button dubbed “Extras” at the bottom of the screen, between Search and Downloads.
On Android, this is currently the “Coming Soon” section; iOS doesn’t offer this section.
However, instead of only teaser trailers as before in “Coming Soon,” you’ll now find both photos and videos from Netflix shows — including, in some cases, shows you already watch, the report notes.
The videos automatically play silently unless you tap the sound button, it appears. You also move through the feed horizontally. That’s a noticeable change from the “Coming Soon” section’s News Feed-like vertical scroll, and one that feels more like Instagram Stories.
And while you could previously tap “Remind Me” to add shows to your list in the “Coming Soon” section, the “Extras” section has tweaked this to display “Remind Me” on shows you currently watch and “My List” on those you want to add.
A sizable sharing button is also included, allowing you to pass along recommendations to friends through other apps.
Netflix has taken ideas from popular social platforms before, as it did when it launched its own Stories-like feature for previews. It has also leveraged social platforms for sharing recommendations — like when it added Instagram Story integrations. This feature combines both elements, in a way, so could prove popular.
The test is running on both iOS and Android, we understand.
The company confirmed the test with us in a statement:
We are testing a feed of video extras in our mobile app to help fans connect more deeply with the titles they love and discover new ones to watch. These tests typically vary in length of time and by region, and may not become permanent.
Image credit: Janko Roettgers / Variety
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Which type of funding is actually best for your business?
Jared Hecht is the co-founder and CEO of Fundera, an online marketplace for small business financial solutions including small business loans. Prior to Fundera, Hecht co-founded group messaging app, GroupMe.
When starting a tech company, there seems to be a playbook that most entrepreneurs follow. While some may start with a bit of bootstrapping, most will dive straight into raising seed money through investors. In many cases, this is a great path. It’s a path I’ve taken twice myself, first with GroupMe, and then again with Fundera.
Ironically, though, my second venture-backed company is a business focused on helping entrepreneurs find debt financing—a process I’ve gone through only once myself. But after five years of building and scaling this business, it’s made me take a step back and consider the question of when and where debt financing might be a better option for a business than equity financing, and vice versa.
I view these financing vehicles differently now than I did half a decade ago, and think it’s time we start to think a bit wider and diversely about how we finance our growing endeavors.
After all, when entrepreneurs take venture capital, they usually sign up to provide a 10x return on an investor’s capital. This expectation ultimately influences how they operate their business in the short-term. Maybe they’re not always ready for that expectation.
Or maybe they know they need to focus on building a good business before a great one. In this case, debt may be the better vehicle, where the only expectation is to pay it back.
Whether it’s money to get your business off the ground, capital to fuel additional growth, or cash to cover a gap, and whether you’re guiding the growth of a burgeoning startup, a smaller business, or even consulting firm helping other entrepreneurs, you should think critically about how you finance your business.
Here’s what to consider.
The power of debt
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Google Cloud gets capacity reservations, extends committed use discounts beyond CPUs
Google Cloud made two significant pricing announcements today. Those, you’ll surely be sad to hear, don’t involve the usual price drops for compute and storage. Instead, Google Cloud today announced that it is extending its committed-use discounts, which give you a significant discount when you commit to using a certain number of resources for one or three years, to GPUs, Cloud TPU Pods and local SSDs. In return for locking yourself into a long-term plan, you can get discounts of 55% off on-demand prices.
In addition, Google is launching a capacity reservation system for Compute Engine that allows users to reserve resources in a specific zone for later use to ensure that they have guaranteed access to these resources when needed.
At first glance, capacity reservations may seem like a weird concept in the cloud. The promise of cloud computing, after all, is that you can just spin machines up and down at will — and never really have to think about availability.
So why launch a reservation system? “This is ideal for use cases like disaster recovery or peace of mind, so a customer knows that they have some extra resources, but also for retail events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday,” Google senior product manager Manish Dalwadi told me.
These users want to have absolute certainty that when they need the resources, they will be available to them. And while many of us think of the large clouds as having a virtually infinite amount of virtual machines available at any time, some machine types may occasionally only be available in a different availability zone, for example, that is not the same zone as where the rest of your compute resources are.
Users can create or delete reservations at any time and any existing discounts — including sustained use discounts and committed use discounts — will be applied automatically.
As for committed-use discounts, it’s worth noting that Google always took a pretty flexible approach to this. Users don’t have to commit to using a specific machine type for three years, for example. Instead, they commit to using a specific number of CPU cores and memory, for example.
“What we heard from customers was that other commit models are just too inflexible and their utilization rates were very low, like 70, 60% utilization,” Google product director Paul Nash told me. “So one of our design goals with committed-use discounts was to figure out how we could provide something that gives us the capacity planning signal that we need, provides the same amount of discounts that we want to pass on to customers, but do it in a way that customers actually feel like they are getting a great deal and so that they don’t have to hyper-manage these things in order to get the most out of them.”
Both the extended committed-use discounts and the new capacity reservation system for Compute Engine resources are now live in the Google Cloud.
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Yellowbrick Data raises $81M Series C for hybrid data warehouse
There’s lots of data in the world these days, and there are a number of companies vying to store that data in data warehouses or lakes or whatever they choose to call it. Old-school companies have tended to be on prem, while new ones like Snowflake are strictly in the cloud. Yellowbrick Data wants to play the hybrid angle, and today it got a healthy $81 million Series C to continue its efforts.
The round was led by DFJ Growth with help from Next47, Third Point Ventures, Menlo Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Threshold Ventures and Samsung. New investors joining the round included IVP and BMW i Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to a brisk $173 million.
Yellowbrick sees a world that many of the public cloud vendors like Microsoft and Google see, one where enterprise companies will be living in a hybrid world where some data and applications will stay on prem and some in the cloud. They believe this situation will be in place for the foreseeable future, so its product plays to that hybrid angle, where your data can be on prem or in the cloud.
The company did not want to discuss valuation in spite of the high amount of raised dollars. Neither did it want to discuss revenue growth rates, other than to say that it was growing at a healthy rate.
Randy Glein, partner at DFJ Growth, did say one of the things that attracted his company to invest in Yellowbrick was its momentum along with the technology, which in his view provides a more modern way to build data warehouses. “Yellowbrick is quickly providing a new generation of ultra-high performance data warehouse capabilities for large enterprises. The technology is a step function improvement on every dimension compared to legacy solutions, helping modern enterprises digest and interpret massive data workloads in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost,” he said in a statement.
It’s interesting that a company with just 100 employees would require this kind of money, but as company COO Jason Snodgress told TechCrunch, it costs a lot of money to build out a data warehouse. He’s not wrong. Snowflake, a company that’s building a cloud data warehouse, has raised almost a billion dollars.
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Skype publicly launches screen sharing on iOS and Android
Skype is taking one of its most popular desktop features to mobile devices: screen sharing. The company announced on Tuesday that its mobile screen sharing feature is now out of beta testing, allowing both iOS and Android users to share their phone’s screen while on a call.
The feature could be used for work-related purposes, as Microsoft has suggested in the past — like sharing a PowerPoint presentation. But it also could be used for fun — like swiping through a dating app while a friend gives their feedback, or for online shopping alongside a friend. More practically, it could be used to give remote tech help, like when your dad can’t find a setting on his iPhone (true story).
Mobile screen sharing was first introduced into beta in April for testers, but is now available to all mobile users.
To access the option, Skype users will tap the newly added “…” (more) menu in the app. This is where you’ll find other recently launched features, as well, including call recording and subtitles.
Also new in this release of Skype for mobile is a redesigned calling screen that now lets you dismiss the call controls with one tap. A second tap dismisses all the controls to make the video call itself the focus. And another tap brings all the controls back.
Despite Skype’s advanced age, the mobile communications app still has some 300 million monthly users. It hasn’t stopped the rollout of new features that allow it to remain relevant in an age where so much messaging is done through chat apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat or through built-in communication services like iMessage and FaceTime.
While not all its changes have been a success — last year Skype had to roll back its overly colorful Snapchat-inspired makeover, for example — it still often adds useful features like HD video, encryption by way of the Signal Protocol and call recording, to name a few.
Mobile screen sharing works on Android 6.0 and higher, and on iOS (iPhone and iPad) with iOS 12 and up. You will only see the option if you’ve updated to the latest release.
Other platforms that support screen sharing include Linux, Mac, Windows and Skype for Windows 10 (version 14).
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LinkedIn to shutter Chitu, its Chinese-language app, in July, redirects users to LinkedIn in Chinese
LinkedIn has long eyed China as an important country to offset slowing growth in more mature markets. But now it’s calling time on a localized effort after failing to see it pick up steam. The company has announced that it will be shutting down Chitu — a Chinese-only app it had built targeting younger people and those who had less of a need to network with people outside of the country — at the end of July.
The closure is notable for a couple of reasons.
First, it marks a retreat of sorts for LinkedIn in the country from building standalone apps to target younger users, and specifically those targeting young professionals, at the same time that LinkedIn also faces stiff competition from other services like Maimai and Zhaopin.
Second, Chitu was a rare (and possibly the only) example of an app from LinkedIn built specifically to target one non-English market — and a very big one at that — by building a social graph independent of LinkedIn’s. Chitu’s shutdown is therefore a sign of how LinkedIn ultimately didn’t succeed in that effort.
The company posted an announcement of the change in Chinese on Chitu’s website, and a spokesperson for LinkedIn confirmed the changes further in a statement provided to TechCrunch, where it described Chitu — which has been around since 2015 — as “one of many experiments.”
It also noted that it will be upgrading the LinkedIn core app as a “one-stop shop,” incorporating some of Chitu’s features, presumably in an effort to attract Chitu’s users rather than lose them altogether.
“Chitu will officially go offline at the end of July 2019,” the company noted in the statement. “In the future, we will focus on the continuous optimization and upgrade of the LinkedIn app, serving as a one-stop shop to accompany Chinese professionals along each step of their career development and connect to more opportunities.” We’ll post the full statement LinkedIn sent us at the bottom of this article.
LinkedIn first officially set up shop in China back in 2014 as “领英”. Its branding firm pointed out at the time that the characters’ pronunciation, “ling ying,” sounding a bit like “LinkedIn” and loosely meant “to lead elites.” It was initially established as a joint venture with Sequoia and CBC as it was still an independent company and not owned by Microsoft at the time.
LinkedIn already had users in the country at that point — some 4 million individuals and 80,000 companies were already using the English-language version of the site at the time — but the idea was to set up a local operation to seize the opportunity of creating services more tailored to the world’s biggest mobile market, which would include local language support, and to meet the regulatory demands of needing to establish local operations to do that. It included efforts to build integrations with other sites like WeChat, as well as bigger partnerships with the likes of Didi.
A year later, Derek Shen, the LinkedIn executive who led the launch of LinkedIn China, spearheaded the launch of Chitu.
The idea was to build a new app that could tap into the smartphone craze that had swept the country, in particular among younger users who had foregone using computers in favor of their hand-held devices that they used to regularly check in on apps like WeChat.
“In the past year, we have done a lot of localization efforts and achieved great results, such as deep integration with WeChat, Weibo, QQ mailbox, and Alibaba,” he wrote in an essay at the time (originally in Chinese).
“However, in general, we are still maintaining a global platform that is not evolving fast enough, and localization is not determined. We believe that only a product that is independent of the global platform can fully meet the unique needs of social networking in China, so that we can really run like a startup.”
LinkedIn would at the same time continue to build out the Chinese version of LinkedIn itself, targeting older and more premium users who might be interacting with people in other languages, like English.
From what we understand, Chitu had a good start, with millions of users signing up in the early years, beating LinkedIn itself on user retention rates and engagement.
But a source says that internally it faced some issues for trying to develop an ecosystem independent of the LinkedIn platform, which only became more challenging after Microsoft acquired the company, the source said. (He didn’t say why, but for starters it would have been more lucrative to monetise a single user base, and develop new features for a single platform, rather than do either across multiple apps.)
“After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, independence became unthinkable,” the source said. “People with entrepreneurial DNA have all left, so it’s natural to shut down Chitu at this point.” It didn’t help that Shen himself left the company in 2017.
It’s unclear how many users Chitu ultimately picked up, but LinkedIn says that it has 47 million LinkedIn members in China, out of a total of 610 million globally. Notably, observers point out that its two big rivals Maimai and Zhaopin are both growing faster.
More generally, and likely to better compete against local players, LinkedIn tells us that it rebooted its growth strategy in the country last month. That new strategy appears to be based fundamentally on any new services or partnerships now stemming from one centralised platform.
“2.0 [as the new strategic effort is called] is built on LinkedIn’s vast global network of professionals with real identities and profiles as the foundation and providing a one-stop-shop services to our members and constructing an ecosystem in China,” a spokesperson said in response to a question we had about whether the company will continue to build out more partnerships with third parties. “We do not exclude any partners who participate in building this ‘one-stop-shop’ and eventually construct a powerful ecosystem.”
Here is the full statement on the shut-down of Chitu:
China is core to LinkedIn’s mission and vision globally – creating economic opportunity to every member of the global workforce. Since entering China in 2014, LinkedIn has explored its development path within the Chinese market, adjusting short-term strategies according to changes in the market environment. This includes Chitu, which launched in 2015, to help LinkedIn expand the social network market through the mobile app.
Chitu is one of many experiments we conducted to continue to learn and provide more value to members. Other efforts include WeChat integration, Sesame Credit partnership etc. Based on user feedback and data analysis, we find that Chinese professionals are proactively seeking for career development opportunities. We incorporate many learnings and insights from Chitu into our new offerings on LinkedIn app that we believe will cover different needs and stages in professional and career development.
Chitu will officially go offline at the end of July 2019, following the completion of its historical mission. In the future, we will focus on the continuous optimization and upgrade of the LinkedIn app, serving as a one-stop shop to accompany Chinese professionals along each step of their career development and connect to more opportunities.
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