8 ms·

The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming

63 points by hgsyndrome 8y ago

klik99 8y ago
What about the value of the data? For a B2B company like MS, seems to me that the goodwill would really be worth that much if it generates future intangibles (useful data). I still see almost every professional with a linkedin account, even if nobody uses it. Imagine what you can infer about what projects other companies are working on just by the social graph. To explain what this article was complaining about, that doesn't give much incentive to make LinkedIn better. Another reason why we need more itemization on intangibles in public filings...
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  The internet needs a single sign-on. Perhaps that's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn?
  - adrianN 8y ago
    The Internet needs no such thing. The possibility to have different personas in different parts of the Internet is one of its best features.
- hgsyndrome 8y ago
  From pg. 75 of the Microsoft FY 2018 10K filing, which shows how their intangibles for LinkedIn acquisition were itemized. This is apart from the $16.8b booked as 'goodwill' from synergy. (In millions) Amount Weighted Average Life Customer-related $ 3,607 7 years Marketing-related (trade names) $2,148 20 years Technology-based $2,109 3 years Contract-based $23 5 years Fair value of intangible assets acquired $7,887 9 years
mobilemidget 8y ago
"Every time this LinkedIn commercial pops up on YouTube I am reminded of how low the company has fallen to." I recently thought the same when facebook started advertising (to me at least) on silly mobile game (the ads those games show)
- hgsyndrome 8y ago
  I'm curious... can you post a link to these FB ads? Tks!
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Wait, they're advertising Facebook itself? Like "Sign up for this new social network...it's called Facebook!"
  - burtonator 8y ago
    As these networks grow they start exhausting normal growth strategies and often have to resort for paying for users. If your customer acquisition cost (CAC)is less than the lifetime value of the customer it's an obvious calculation. If you pay $15 for a user but they make you $100 ... do it!
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    After the whole Cambridge Analytica thing I even saw physical facebook ads on the train, talking about how they weren't creepy and fake news is bad. It was strange to see.
    - pirocks 8y ago
      I'm still seeing these on the underground.
      - nkrisc 8y ago
        They were all over the L in Chicago, but I haven't seen them for quite some time. Though I think Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular might have an even worse image over there than they do here.
    - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
      These showed up in Chicago for months. It was a whole series, they said "Spam is not your friends", "Clickbait is not your friends", "Fake accounts are not your friends" and "Fake news is not your friends". It was funny to me, because it felt like they were reminding me of everything that made me hate (and subsequently abandon) Facebook in the first place. The whole ad campaign felt like a setup for the punch line "Facebook is not your friends.
forgotAgain 8y ago
Hmm, Fall behind in search, spend billions on Bing. Fall behind in mobile, spend billions on Nokia. Fall behind in social media, spend billions on LinkedIn. Hmm, so what was that definition of insanity again?
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  All true. Yet somehow, as of today, they're still relevant. Perhaps not insane but certainly somewhat of a surprise. p.s. Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a bad thing.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    That just makes it all the more clearer how valuable it was for Microsoft to have Windows and Office be ingrained into many organizations' workflows.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    > Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a bad thing. I don't think that's a fair comparison. When the iPod and then iTunes entered the scene, the MP3 player market was very small and immature. The product they put forth was untouchable because it didn't address one or two gripes with MP3 players of the time, it addressed almost all of them. The failed Microsoft products all entered mature markets with very strong incumbents. When the iPod arrived on the scene it was half the size of the Creative HDD based MP3 players that here hot shit at the time and wasn't trying to look like futuristic discman. It featured a high speed interface (Firewire) so it didn't take weeks to load your music. The interface actually helped you quickly browse your gigabytes of sound files unlike everyone else whose UIs were d-pad based nightmares that made browsing more than a few hundred MP3s a hassle. It had a rechargeable battery that lasted longer than any other player of which most were still using AA as power. The most compelling alternative to the iPod was probably the iRiver H1xx series and it didn't arrive until 2 years later and still had a horribly crippled UI but equally high price. All the incumbent tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and Google entered the markets they dominate when those markets were very immature and relatively new. Their products had multiple advantages over the competition, if any, and quickly captured the market before anyone realized what happened.
ataturk 8y ago
I have zero confidence in LinkedIn. I was one of the first million users of it. I lament ever signing up. It's never found me a job, it's never done anything but expose me to a wide swatch of down market recruiting firms that try to use volume to make money. I don't want to help those fools, I have a problem with all these middlemen no matter what level they are at--they have done nothing to help the tech industry, they are just leeches who soak up money and provide no value. They have ruined our business, quite frankly. I'm sick of it all. The 21st century is not looking very bright and we need to turn that around and doing something about privacy and big corporations running our lives is the first step. To hell with LinkedIn and Facebook and the rest--they aren't there for us, they exist to make money and push an agenda and that agenda is in opposition to a free and open society operating based on a set of laws that apply to everyone equally. All these companies do is undermine civic life and thus civilization itself and we should not tolerate that. Next stop is Chinese-style communist tyranny arrived at by corporate means. It won't matter in the end how we got there, that's the thing. It is merely bad for us regular people.
intopieces 8y ago
To succeed, Microsoft needs to make LinkedIn the anti-Facebook in terms of content, usefulness and trust. So far, this does not seem to be the case. I see fake profiles, click bait, flamewars, and ever-present recruiter spam. It isn't Microsoft's fault, per se. It's a hard problem.
- webdood90 8y ago
  It's amazing how bad the content has become. It feels the same as Facebook, if not worse. Sometimes I'll log on just to "people watch", but that's about the extent of my usage.
  - intopieces 8y ago
    Yes, my naive assumption was that if people presented their real names and their jobs in the same place, the discussion would be more civil — aren’t we in the era where people lose their jobs for Twitter rants? - but the negative content persists to the point that people are making memes(!) to push the idea of making LinkedIn more civil. Strange times.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  For high quality content, usefulness, and trust, you need curation. Full stop. Unless they plan on doing that, they can't pretend like they either have it or will have it.
  - intopieces 8y ago
    I agree, but curation is often considered censorship, which results in negative press.
ChefboyOG 8y ago
I, and many people it seems, agree with several of the criticisms—LinkedIn ads are terrible, LI's core product is not enjoyable as a user, and the gaggle of branded apps are an absolute clusterfuck. However, the piece gets sloppy when the author starts speculating that Office 365's growth will lead to antitrust suits.
drivingmenuts 8y ago
Linked in is a great network for recruiters, if you're recruiting other recruiters. For people who actually do a real job, not so much.
AznHisoka 8y ago
Linkedin will still remain valuable in the recruiting industry. I hate it, but I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential employers when they see I'm not in it. But as for everything else, most people are consumers. They consume content - whether it's cat photos, videos, news, etc. Linkedin offers none of that. People just go there when they need a job. So I don't see how they can increase engagement in a platform where 99% of people in the world just want to consume.
- freehunter 8y ago
  I've worked some jobs where "be active on a LinkedIn community" is part of the job. Some employers treat it like going to a conference.
- mr_custard 8y ago
  > I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential employers when they see I'm not in it Really? Do you think people base such impressions upon solid logic, or is it simply some sort of employer groupthink? I like to think that potential employers will respect my decision to avoid the vacuous LinkedIn crazy town, rather than mark me down for it. Depends who's hiring I guess. If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being on LinkedIn certainly makes a positive impression upon me :-)
  - 1zee 8y ago
    I respect your optimisim
    - mr_custard 8y ago
      Bless you, sir! Anecdotal sample of one: my last 5 positions came from real life networking (meetups, local dev communities & reputation) rather than via a LinkedIn account, which as you've no doubt surmised, I no longer have.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being on LinkedIn certainly makes a positive impression upon me :-) Isn't it kind of the same sort of thing as "wearing pants to a job interview" now? Just part of the expected decorum for functioning as a professional? I understand it can be a bit of a crazy town, but there's a difference between "being on there" and "putting up inspirational quotes at 15 minute intervals".
alkonaut 8y ago
I think the problem is that it's trying to become some sort of "pro facebook". But I have no, zero, interest in actually visiting unless I'm a recruiter. I don't care that someone posts a motivational video or a colleague celebrates 10 years at Innotek. All I want to do as a non-recruiter is maintain a reasonably sized network for that time in 5 years when I do want to check my network. Until then, I don't ever want to log in. So to me it it does proide value, but how much value do I provide? I suppose my aging profile does provide some material for recruiters so that the keep spending for pro recruiter features. But I don't think they'll ever be a facebook that can have significant ad-revenue from recurring visitors.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I would think, and I'm speculating here, that the idea is that the kind of ads they have, justify a high CPC, precisely because you only go there when you're looking to hop jobs. Fewer people clicking that ad out of curiousity, with no possibility of applying for the position posted. $5 CPC makes sense if it gets you a new employee, since (even if it's only 1% of those clicking who you hire) that is a small part of total cost of employee acquisition. I have no idea if this is actually the strategy, or if this is actually working, I'm just floating it as a possibility. You only go there if you're a recruiter, or thinking about getting new work, or you have been asked by somebody else to endorse, and that would be a good thing, in this scenario, since it improves the signal-to-noise ratio.
  - freewilly1040 8y ago
    To paraphrase the point in the context of the GP comment, you might only be checking it once every five years when you're looking for a new job, but this means that when you _are_ looking for a new job LinkedIn is the first to know.
    - rossdavidh 8y ago
      Wow that is way better than the way I put it.
_sword 8y ago
This is a historical analysis that’s a couple years out of date. Under Microsoft, LinkedIn revenues have re-accelerated growth to 33% Y/Y in the most recent quarter vs. LinkedIn decelerating substantially to ~20’s % Y/Y growth independently. We’re about at the point where Microsoft expected LinkedIn to become earnings accretive as well, though that’s more difficult to tease out from numbers.
jaabe 8y ago
I don’t know a single manager or leading figure in management who isn’t utilizing LinkedIn. It’s used for recruitment, idea-sharing, networking, following and genuine discussion. I fully understand how that can go unnoticed, because I didn’t notice for a long while. Before I was invited to help formulate national standards on enterprise architecture I rarely used LinkedIn. It’s not where developers network, not by a long shot. But I entered these multi-municipal networks, and through that work I was exposed to the greater sum of LinkedIn. It’s not an understatement to say that it’s a platform you can’t ignore if you work with any sort of management, and project/change-management applies to this. Today it’s the only social network I have installed on my phone, precisely for this reason. On my morning commute this morning I learned about a new AI project in our neighbouring municipality as an example of just how useful it is. I probably would have heard about it eventually at one of the yearly events the project owner and I both attend, but now I heard about it in time to enter the project with them. This is anecdotal of course and maybe this is a Danish thing, maybe it’s even more profound in our public sector, but I think LinkedIn is rather valuable and increasingly so.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Absolutely true, casual users don't realize how valuable LinkedIn is for recruiting and sales in general. Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM competitor to Salesforce and have it integrate with their other cloud offerings like LinkedIn...it's going to be quite something. I don't think anyone will be able to compete with it, if I'm being honest. The blog comically says this will lead to "monopoly" status, and I don't see how. The blog post says all this integration is never going to happen, but I don't know if they have ever worked for a large corporation or not...but it takes a while to get the wheels spinning especially after an acquisition. Anyone that thinks LinkedIn was a dumb purchase by Microsoft does so at their own peril.
  - porker 8y ago
    > Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM competitor to Salesforce Given how Salesforce is squeezing every last cent out of users (new or long-time) that day can't come soon enough. I like Salesforce (the product) and enjoy working with it more than I ever enjoyed Dynamics CRM, but their price hikes are getting too much for customers to stomach.
skilled 8y ago
I just don't get any social signals from LinkedIn's UI. Whenever I open the homepage I immediately look away from the news feed as it is utter garbage. The same goes for groups. I think there is some potential to make LinkedIn work, but it has to start with a thoughtful redesign. Of course, the right way would be that users themselves communicate rather than having the design do it for you. But at this point the platform has dug itself in too deep of a ditch.
mattnewport 8y ago
I can't see LinkedIn ever having the kind of engagement Facebook gets but it also seems harder to leave completely than Facebook. When I decided to stop using Facebook it was fairly easy and had little to no impact on my life. Though I don't really like the experience of using LinkedIn it's harder to avoid as I'm often asked to look at profile of job candidates there for work and I imagine if I'm ever looking for work in the future my profile will need to be updated as part of the job search.
d--b 8y ago
Wow. It's the first time I see a professional chart that triggers such a strong optical illusion: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXxD3Ybg.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXx... Is the zero axis horizontal?
- majewsky 8y ago
  According to KRuler, it is.
pjc50 8y ago
LinkedIn's continuing existence is a good argument that decentralisation is harder than people think. To a large extent it's just competing with "job boards" and "CVs", but it adds just enough value as an intermediary that it's persisted.
kylej762 8y ago
This article makes a lot of good points about the acquisition of LinkedIn. Such as, the ultimate play of LinkedIn user integration into the Microsoft suite as the billion dollar idea for Micrsoft. However, near the end, the author points our a painfully obvious contradiction of his knowledge on Linkedin by saying, "there is no transparency as to how LinkedIn's revenue has grown..." While I understand the Facebook comparison, I believe it to be a little off base. LinkedIn has two distinct business lines, advertising (like Facebook) and a B2B recruiting software platform. On the advertising front, I could not agree more with the article. Working in the B2B marketing space for a while, we completely cut LinkedIn ads due to poor reach of our defined target audience. Working in the fintech space, we targeted the appropriate persona, yet came away with hundreds of likes from irrelevant professions. Coupled with the price, we left almost immediately. However, I believe that LinkedIn is expanding on a B2B play. Selling recruiting solutions. LinkedIn is calling them "Talent Solutions." In October, LinkedIn purchased Glint, based out of the bay area [1]. Glint focuses primarily on B2B HR solutions, using surveys and AI to comprehend employee engagement and satisfaction. With LinkedIn's talent solution + Glint's HR solution, LinkedIn, and Microsoft, is making a horizontal play onto the HR landscape. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee-engagement-and-retention-platform-glint/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee...
- gHosts 8y ago
  > Selling recruiting solutions Sadly the "Jobs you might be interested in..." from linkedin are, despite knowing quite a bit about what my skills are.... almost always completely irrelevant. ie. They have the data... they are mind blowingly incompetent at using it.
framersqool 8y ago
LinkedIn represents in spectacular fashion how the internet runs primarily on wide-eyed, childlike gullibility: anybody can claim to be whoever or whatever they choose to portray themselves as, and no one the wiser. During my time using LI a few years back I found it occasionally a venue for some halfway decent discussions, usually on topics having precious little to do with business, management, recruiting etc, but its focus on matters of business was laughable. The "INfluencers Program" was little more than a bully pulpit for self-important yuppies to work their personal brands, and the way some of these vacuous outbursts passing as articles by their so-called "INfluencers" would be boasting tens of thousands of views within hours of posting made it look like a conspicuous pay-to-play scam with authors paying for artificial read stats to elevate their own profiles. Meanwhile, I encountered so many scammers and spammers obviously hiding behind false identities as to make it a rival for twitter in terms of its lowlife untrustworthiness as a serious means to make contacts for serious purposes. Probably these comments here trumpeting its legitimacy as a corporate recruiting and networking tool are written by LI employees or on contract by ghostwriters, because you could stand on a street corner with a handmade sign saying "I Am Someone Important, Honest" and you'd be making a more credible representation of yourself than anyone with the sense God gave geese could possibly see LinkedIn as being useful for.

63 points by hgsyndrome 8y ago

What about the value of the data? For a B2B company like MS, seems to me that the goodwill would really be worth that much if it generates future intangibles (useful data). I still see almost every professional with a linkedin account, even if nobody uses it. Imagine what you can infer about what projects other companies are working on just by the social graph. To explain what this article was complaining about, that doesn't give much incentive to make LinkedIn better. Another reason why we need more itemization on intangibles in public filings...

gwbas1c 8y ago
The internet needs a single sign-on. Perhaps that's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn?
- adrianN 8y ago
  The Internet needs no such thing. The possibility to have different personas in different parts of the Internet is one of its best features.
hgsyndrome 8y ago
From pg. 75 of the Microsoft FY 2018 10K filing, which shows how their intangibles for LinkedIn acquisition were itemized. This is apart from the $16.8b booked as 'goodwill' from synergy. (In millions) Amount Weighted Average Life Customer-related $ 3,607 7 years Marketing-related (trade names) $2,148 20 years Technology-based $2,109 3 years Contract-based $23 5 years Fair value of intangible assets acquired $7,887 9 years

mobilemidget 8y ago

"Every time this LinkedIn commercial pops up on YouTube I am reminded of how low the company has fallen to." I recently thought the same when facebook started advertising (to me at least) on silly mobile game (the ads those games show)

hgsyndrome 8y ago
I'm curious... can you post a link to these FB ads? Tks!
ForHackernews 8y ago
Wait, they're advertising Facebook itself? Like "Sign up for this new social network...it's called Facebook!"
- burtonator 8y ago
  As these networks grow they start exhausting normal growth strategies and often have to resort for paying for users. If your customer acquisition cost (CAC)is less than the lifetime value of the customer it's an obvious calculation. If you pay $15 for a user but they make you $100 ... do it!
- nkrisc 8y ago
  After the whole Cambridge Analytica thing I even saw physical facebook ads on the train, talking about how they weren't creepy and fake news is bad. It was strange to see.
  - pirocks 8y ago
    I'm still seeing these on the underground.
    - nkrisc 8y ago
      They were all over the L in Chicago, but I haven't seen them for quite some time. Though I think Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular might have an even worse image over there than they do here.
  - Notorious_BLT 8y ago
    These showed up in Chicago for months. It was a whole series, they said "Spam is not your friends", "Clickbait is not your friends", "Fake accounts are not your friends" and "Fake news is not your friends". It was funny to me, because it felt like they were reminding me of everything that made me hate (and subsequently abandon) Facebook in the first place. The whole ad campaign felt like a setup for the punch line "Facebook is not your friends.

forgotAgain 8y ago

Hmm, Fall behind in search, spend billions on Bing. Fall behind in mobile, spend billions on Nokia. Fall behind in social media, spend billions on LinkedIn. Hmm, so what was that definition of insanity again?

chiefalchemist 8y ago
All true. Yet somehow, as of today, they're still relevant. Perhaps not insane but certainly somewhat of a surprise. p.s. Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a bad thing.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  That just makes it all the more clearer how valuable it was for Microsoft to have Windows and Office be ingrained into many organizations' workflows.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  > Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a bad thing. I don't think that's a fair comparison. When the iPod and then iTunes entered the scene, the MP3 player market was very small and immature. The product they put forth was untouchable because it didn't address one or two gripes with MP3 players of the time, it addressed almost all of them. The failed Microsoft products all entered mature markets with very strong incumbents. When the iPod arrived on the scene it was half the size of the Creative HDD based MP3 players that here hot shit at the time and wasn't trying to look like futuristic discman. It featured a high speed interface (Firewire) so it didn't take weeks to load your music. The interface actually helped you quickly browse your gigabytes of sound files unlike everyone else whose UIs were d-pad based nightmares that made browsing more than a few hundred MP3s a hassle. It had a rechargeable battery that lasted longer than any other player of which most were still using AA as power. The most compelling alternative to the iPod was probably the iRiver H1xx series and it didn't arrive until 2 years later and still had a horribly crippled UI but equally high price. All the incumbent tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and Google entered the markets they dominate when those markets were very immature and relatively new. Their products had multiple advantages over the competition, if any, and quickly captured the market before anyone realized what happened.

ataturk 8y ago

I have zero confidence in LinkedIn. I was one of the first million users of it. I lament ever signing up. It's never found me a job, it's never done anything but expose me to a wide swatch of down market recruiting firms that try to use volume to make money. I don't want to help those fools, I have a problem with all these middlemen no matter what level they are at--they have done nothing to help the tech industry, they are just leeches who soak up money and provide no value. They have ruined our business, quite frankly. I'm sick of it all. The 21st century is not looking very bright and we need to turn that around and doing something about privacy and big corporations running our lives is the first step. To hell with LinkedIn and Facebook and the rest--they aren't there for us, they exist to make money and push an agenda and that agenda is in opposition to a free and open society operating based on a set of laws that apply to everyone equally. All these companies do is undermine civic life and thus civilization itself and we should not tolerate that. Next stop is Chinese-style communist tyranny arrived at by corporate means. It won't matter in the end how we got there, that's the thing. It is merely bad for us regular people.

intopieces 8y ago

To succeed, Microsoft needs to make LinkedIn the anti-Facebook in terms of content, usefulness and trust. So far, this does not seem to be the case. I see fake profiles, click bait, flamewars, and ever-present recruiter spam. It isn't Microsoft's fault, per se. It's a hard problem.

webdood90 8y ago
It's amazing how bad the content has become. It feels the same as Facebook, if not worse. Sometimes I'll log on just to "people watch", but that's about the extent of my usage.
- intopieces 8y ago
  Yes, my naive assumption was that if people presented their real names and their jobs in the same place, the discussion would be more civil — aren’t we in the era where people lose their jobs for Twitter rants? - but the negative content persists to the point that people are making memes(!) to push the idea of making LinkedIn more civil. Strange times.
lallysingh 8y ago
For high quality content, usefulness, and trust, you need curation. Full stop. Unless they plan on doing that, they can't pretend like they either have it or will have it.
- intopieces 8y ago
  I agree, but curation is often considered censorship, which results in negative press.

ChefboyOG 8y ago

I, and many people it seems, agree with several of the criticisms—LinkedIn ads are terrible, LI's core product is not enjoyable as a user, and the gaggle of branded apps are an absolute clusterfuck. However, the piece gets sloppy when the author starts speculating that Office 365's growth will lead to antitrust suits.

drivingmenuts 8y ago

Linked in is a great network for recruiters, if you're recruiting other recruiters. For people who actually do a real job, not so much.

AznHisoka 8y ago

Linkedin will still remain valuable in the recruiting industry. I hate it, but I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential employers when they see I'm not in it. But as for everything else, most people are consumers. They consume content - whether it's cat photos, videos, news, etc. Linkedin offers none of that. People just go there when they need a job. So I don't see how they can increase engagement in a platform where 99% of people in the world just want to consume.

freehunter 8y ago
I've worked some jobs where "be active on a LinkedIn community" is part of the job. Some employers treat it like going to a conference.
mr_custard 8y ago
> I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential employers when they see I'm not in it Really? Do you think people base such impressions upon solid logic, or is it simply some sort of employer groupthink? I like to think that potential employers will respect my decision to avoid the vacuous LinkedIn crazy town, rather than mark me down for it. Depends who's hiring I guess. If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being on LinkedIn certainly makes a positive impression upon me :-)
- 1zee 8y ago
  I respect your optimisim
  - mr_custard 8y ago
    Bless you, sir! Anecdotal sample of one: my last 5 positions came from real life networking (meetups, local dev communities & reputation) rather than via a LinkedIn account, which as you've no doubt surmised, I no longer have.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being on LinkedIn certainly makes a positive impression upon me :-) Isn't it kind of the same sort of thing as "wearing pants to a job interview" now? Just part of the expected decorum for functioning as a professional? I understand it can be a bit of a crazy town, but there's a difference between "being on there" and "putting up inspirational quotes at 15 minute intervals".

alkonaut 8y ago

I think the problem is that it's trying to become some sort of "pro facebook". But I have no, zero, interest in actually visiting unless I'm a recruiter. I don't care that someone posts a motivational video or a colleague celebrates 10 years at Innotek. All I want to do as a non-recruiter is maintain a reasonably sized network for that time in 5 years when I do want to check my network. Until then, I don't ever want to log in. So to me it it does proide value, but how much value do I provide? I suppose my aging profile does provide some material for recruiters so that the keep spending for pro recruiter features. But I don't think they'll ever be a facebook that can have significant ad-revenue from recurring visitors.

rossdavidh 8y ago
I would think, and I'm speculating here, that the idea is that the kind of ads they have, justify a high CPC, precisely because you only go there when you're looking to hop jobs. Fewer people clicking that ad out of curiousity, with no possibility of applying for the position posted. $5 CPC makes sense if it gets you a new employee, since (even if it's only 1% of those clicking who you hire) that is a small part of total cost of employee acquisition. I have no idea if this is actually the strategy, or if this is actually working, I'm just floating it as a possibility. You only go there if you're a recruiter, or thinking about getting new work, or you have been asked by somebody else to endorse, and that would be a good thing, in this scenario, since it improves the signal-to-noise ratio.
- freewilly1040 8y ago
  To paraphrase the point in the context of the GP comment, you might only be checking it once every five years when you're looking for a new job, but this means that when you _are_ looking for a new job LinkedIn is the first to know.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    Wow that is way better than the way I put it.

_sword 8y ago

This is a historical analysis that’s a couple years out of date. Under Microsoft, LinkedIn revenues have re-accelerated growth to 33% Y/Y in the most recent quarter vs. LinkedIn decelerating substantially to ~20’s % Y/Y growth independently. We’re about at the point where Microsoft expected LinkedIn to become earnings accretive as well, though that’s more difficult to tease out from numbers.

jaabe 8y ago

I don’t know a single manager or leading figure in management who isn’t utilizing LinkedIn. It’s used for recruitment, idea-sharing, networking, following and genuine discussion. I fully understand how that can go unnoticed, because I didn’t notice for a long while. Before I was invited to help formulate national standards on enterprise architecture I rarely used LinkedIn. It’s not where developers network, not by a long shot. But I entered these multi-municipal networks, and through that work I was exposed to the greater sum of LinkedIn. It’s not an understatement to say that it’s a platform you can’t ignore if you work with any sort of management, and project/change-management applies to this. Today it’s the only social network I have installed on my phone, precisely for this reason. On my morning commute this morning I learned about a new AI project in our neighbouring municipality as an example of just how useful it is. I probably would have heard about it eventually at one of the yearly events the project owner and I both attend, but now I heard about it in time to enter the project with them. This is anecdotal of course and maybe this is a Danish thing, maybe it’s even more profound in our public sector, but I think LinkedIn is rather valuable and increasingly so.

partiallypro 8y ago
Absolutely true, casual users don't realize how valuable LinkedIn is for recruiting and sales in general. Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM competitor to Salesforce and have it integrate with their other cloud offerings like LinkedIn...it's going to be quite something. I don't think anyone will be able to compete with it, if I'm being honest. The blog comically says this will lead to "monopoly" status, and I don't see how. The blog post says all this integration is never going to happen, but I don't know if they have ever worked for a large corporation or not...but it takes a while to get the wheels spinning especially after an acquisition. Anyone that thinks LinkedIn was a dumb purchase by Microsoft does so at their own peril.
- porker 8y ago
  > Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM competitor to Salesforce Given how Salesforce is squeezing every last cent out of users (new or long-time) that day can't come soon enough. I like Salesforce (the product) and enjoy working with it more than I ever enjoyed Dynamics CRM, but their price hikes are getting too much for customers to stomach.

skilled 8y ago

I just don't get any social signals from LinkedIn's UI. Whenever I open the homepage I immediately look away from the news feed as it is utter garbage. The same goes for groups. I think there is some potential to make LinkedIn work, but it has to start with a thoughtful redesign. Of course, the right way would be that users themselves communicate rather than having the design do it for you. But at this point the platform has dug itself in too deep of a ditch.

mattnewport 8y ago

I can't see LinkedIn ever having the kind of engagement Facebook gets but it also seems harder to leave completely than Facebook. When I decided to stop using Facebook it was fairly easy and had little to no impact on my life. Though I don't really like the experience of using LinkedIn it's harder to avoid as I'm often asked to look at profile of job candidates there for work and I imagine if I'm ever looking for work in the future my profile will need to be updated as part of the job search.

d--b 8y ago

Wow. It's the first time I see a professional chart that triggers such a strong optical illusion: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXxD3Ybg.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXx... Is the zero axis horizontal?

majewsky 8y ago
According to KRuler, it is.

pjc50 8y ago

LinkedIn's continuing existence is a good argument that decentralisation is harder than people think. To a large extent it's just competing with "job boards" and "CVs", but it adds just enough value as an intermediary that it's persisted.

kylej762 8y ago

This article makes a lot of good points about the acquisition of LinkedIn. Such as, the ultimate play of LinkedIn user integration into the Microsoft suite as the billion dollar idea for Micrsoft. However, near the end, the author points our a painfully obvious contradiction of his knowledge on Linkedin by saying, "there is no transparency as to how LinkedIn's revenue has grown..." While I understand the Facebook comparison, I believe it to be a little off base. LinkedIn has two distinct business lines, advertising (like Facebook) and a B2B recruiting software platform. On the advertising front, I could not agree more with the article. Working in the B2B marketing space for a while, we completely cut LinkedIn ads due to poor reach of our defined target audience. Working in the fintech space, we targeted the appropriate persona, yet came away with hundreds of likes from irrelevant professions. Coupled with the price, we left almost immediately. However, I believe that LinkedIn is expanding on a B2B play. Selling recruiting solutions. LinkedIn is calling them "Talent Solutions." In October, LinkedIn purchased Glint, based out of the bay area [1]. Glint focuses primarily on B2B HR solutions, using surveys and AI to comprehend employee engagement and satisfaction. With LinkedIn's talent solution + Glint's HR solution, LinkedIn, and Microsoft, is making a horizontal play onto the HR landscape. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee-engagement-and-retention-platform-glint/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee...

gHosts 8y ago
> Selling recruiting solutions Sadly the "Jobs you might be interested in..." from linkedin are, despite knowing quite a bit about what my skills are.... almost always completely irrelevant. ie. They have the data... they are mind blowingly incompetent at using it.

framersqool 8y ago

LinkedIn represents in spectacular fashion how the internet runs primarily on wide-eyed, childlike gullibility: anybody can claim to be whoever or whatever they choose to portray themselves as, and no one the wiser. During my time using LI a few years back I found it occasionally a venue for some halfway decent discussions, usually on topics having precious little to do with business, management, recruiting etc, but its focus on matters of business was laughable. The "INfluencers Program" was little more than a bully pulpit for self-important yuppies to work their personal brands, and the way some of these vacuous outbursts passing as articles by their so-called "INfluencers" would be boasting tens of thousands of views within hours of posting made it look like a conspicuous pay-to-play scam with authors paying for artificial read stats to elevate their own profiles. Meanwhile, I encountered so many scammers and spammers obviously hiding behind false identities as to make it a rival for twitter in terms of its lowlife untrustworthiness as a serious means to make contacts for serious purposes. Probably these comments here trumpeting its legitimacy as a corporate recruiting and networking tool are written by LI employees or on contract by ghostwriters, because you could stand on a street corner with a handmade sign saying "I Am Someone Important, Honest" and you'd be making a more credible representation of yourself than anyone with the sense God gave geese could possibly see LinkedIn as being useful for.