A bad recommendation system is one that never gets a thumbs down

And that, Johnson said, has helped smooth over the company’s relationship with publishers, some of whom took umbrage in March at Zite stripping the ads from their webpages to build the custom magazines. (That group included Condé Nast, which owns Wired.com).

“If 20 percent are sharing, it’s almost like free advertising for publishers,” Johnson said. “And readers are finding content they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Zite grew out of technology built for the pre-iPad era and was previously known as Worio, which labored for years doing document classification.

“Worio had great technology, but a product problem,” Johnson said.

The system looks at more than 100 elements of a news story, including its tone and the size words used. Readers can add a range of interests — from surfing to taxidermy — and on average, users add 13 categories.