News Corp and LinkedIn

Mike Butcher breaks the rumour - News Corp is to buy LinkedIn.

If Mike says the source is reliable I believe him. Still, I can't see what News Corp would want with LinkedIn. Quite apart from the old debate (BusinessWeek) about whether LinkedIn is or isn't "MySpace for grown-ups" (and I don't think we can any longer get away from the conclusion that for the moment MySpace for grown-ups is Facebook), comparisons between Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace and the rumoured LinkedIn deal seem forced.

According to comScore, the average UK MySpace user spends spends eight times as many minutes per month on MySpace as the average LinkedIn user spends on LinkedIn. The levels of engagement achieved by the two sites are simply not comparable, and in an attention economy LinkedIn's failure to create engagement means it just isn't playing in MySpace's league.

(Why the huge engagement gap? Because you can't really do anything on LinkedIn. You certainly can't spend time or hang out there. See my previous commentary here, as well as comments from Umair and Mathew Ingram.)

MySpace is distinctively a media play. For News Corp, it was an obvious horizontal integration move to own one of the platforms that people are now using to consume their media - a platform in favour of which they are turning off their TVs, indeed a platform that is now being used directly as a cross-selling and cross-marketing channel to launch episodes of the Simpsons and premiere and sell Fox's films - all of course owned by News Corp. Bebo may have been late to this party, but its relaunch last week as a music and video platform indicates thinking along similar lines. Social nets are the new TV channels. By now this should come as news to none of us.

But LinkedIn as a TV channel? Or as any other sort of media platform? Sure, the demographic fit is right for the Wall Street Journal and probably for the Times. That doesn't  mean LinkedIn can do for News Corp what MySpace can do for News Corp. The engagement and the integration just isn't there.

Comments

[PaulSweeney]

Maybe this is not a pure "attention play", maybe this is a "recruitment classifieds play"? if you were to get a job or recruit successfully though this channel, that is about 30K a pop right there. You need to get a lot of click throughs to earn that kind of wonga. just a thought.

[PaulSweeney]

oops. Just read Mr. Butcher's piece, and he says all that stuff about classifieds. Lesson learned.

[Mike Butcher]

Thanks for your faith in the story Seamus. I have no doubt your analysis is better than my humble journalism (in all seriousness!), but I would add that that LinkedIn has joined OpenSocial and will be releasing an API, so there is life in the old dog yet, and Murdoch would not buy anything which had no growth plans. My two cents anyway.

[Seamus McCauley]

Mike - not necessarily saying LinkedIn would be a bad buy for News Corp. I think your analysis of the possibilities for the site is spot on. But my first thought on seeing the story was that people would look at this as just another News/MySpace deal, and I think it's important to stress that the two sites are different in every important respect.

Paul - yup, that's likely to be the model.

Thanks for commenting guys.