NYT and LinkedIn Join Each Other
A few days back the New York Times online and LinkedIn (a very popular social network for professionals) joined together in a substantial content deal that will mutually benefit the giants. Its like Web content's Panama Canal joining two oceans of users with a cleverly-placed shortcut.
This
is significant for the two sites. LinkedIn is seen as a network
reference-only site that is infrequently sourced by an enourmous based
of members. The New York Times is a news giant who's seeing their
numbers decline like all other news orgs. This is a marriage of
convenience that is significant for many reasons.
First, the New York Times is in a unique position to help LinkedIn with catch-of-the-day content relevant to sectors suiting their members' interestes. LinkedIn has seen fresh subscribable content as their Achilles heel. People only visit when they have a specific networking need. The New York Times can address LinkedIn's content freshness with little additional cost or effort.
Second, this is significant because LinkedIn boasts millions of members who aren't currently visitng the New York Times. Ad revenues will likely increase as a result right out of the gate.
The question is, will people who happen to be confirming the occasional Link request use LinkedIn as their news portal? And will the New York Times online drive more people to LinkedIn? It remains to be seen. I predict this marriage will favor the New York Times as their merely opening another channel for incoming traffic which will boost the money they can make on advertising. LinkedIn, at least in the beginning, will not likely see reciprocal traffic from their new partner because people who are quickly accessing their daily news fix are less likely to jump into relationship building.
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This is not so exciting, more or less another of many ad rev attempts by LI. I suspect. Now..the recent contextual ad maneuver, thats somewhat exciting.
Interesting. Looks like LinkedIn is planning to pull in news stories relevant to your industry.
I agree that people won't use their LinkedIn profile as a news portal, but any traffic is good traffic for the NYT. I wonder if there will be any traffic that goes from the NYT to LinkedIn.
Also noteworthy is LinkedIn's approach to 3rd party app development. It's conservative stance (as opposed to FaceBook's "anything goes" approach) will limit development on it's platform. We'll have to wait and see if their more restrictive strategy works out for them.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/linkedin-plans-to-open-up-in-a-closed-sort-of-way/
What an exciting marriage. Like most social networking sites, LinkedIn is a blast at the beginning as you are building your network. After a few months (or a couple of years) it gets less exciting. The most valuable part of LinkedIn is taking it offline and meeting your network in person. This combination with the NYT will make is so that people have common issues, from a common source, to talk about when they take their networking offline.
I applaud this combination.
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