LinkedIn's new strategy to target news content

Is LinkedIn the new best friend for media outlets and journalists? If you’re an active user of the American platform, you will undoubtedly have noticed changes in your feed in recent months. Previously very focused on the world of business and recruitment, LinkedIn increasingly seems to feature news content and highlight it.

In an interview with Axios earlier this year, the chief editor and vice president of LinkedIn, Dan Roth, said that LinkedIn intends to now place greater emphasis on news and journalistic content. The platform is expecting to test a new NewsBanner atop the feed on its mobile app to highlight news stories that are developing online. By taking this turn towards news, LinkedIn hopes to drive both usage and ad revenue, according to a spokesperson who talked with The Information.

This strategy is developed against the backdrop of a decline in news exposure on other platforms, such as Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Facebook. “The key to the growth of LinkedIn is how the other social media platforms have gradually downgraded news content in the last couple of years. Either by choice on Meta’s various platforms or publishers trying to find a more non-toxic environment to share content on,” explained Dr. Jonathan Cable, senior lecturer in PR, Media, and Communications at Swansea University, in Wales. 

Meta has, for example, last year discontinued the Facebook News tab, once a space for high-quality journalism, in some European countries. In the meantime, X owner Elon Musk said he values “citizen journalism” and has temporarily banned some reporters who have criticised him. “X no longer provides a safe space to share content under Musk’s leadership. Against this backdrop, other platforms have sought to capitalise on a gap in the market,” said Cable.

“I really see a movement of people using less X for news and more LinkedIn for more than one year,” said Ismael Nafría, a specialist in digital media, creator of the newsletter Tendenci@s.

Many people are a little bit tired of how other social media has been recently related to news, especially X, where it’s difficult to know who’s behind an account and if it’s fake or not

Ismael Nafría

“This is not happening on LinkedIn, you feel very comfortable on your feed, and you can recognise people and companies, or even media.”

New opportunities for the media?

LinkedIn, which has historically relied on text and links, is now developing newsletters, podcasts, and video opportunities. One of the company’s objectives is to offer outlets and journalists a platform to meaningfully grow their audiences when we know that LinkedIn has more than 850 million users worldwide. 

“Demographically, the majority of the users are aged between 25 to 34 and university educated. This last point tends to indicate a greater interest in news and current affairs. But, given its professional employment focus, news about particular industries is potentially more useful for users than general breaking news,” said Jonathan Cable.

“On LinkedIn, you need to offer content that has a professional orientation,” Ismael Nafría says. “It is not really a place to promote content that is not really good content, like clickbaits.” LinkedIn said it is also working with over 400 news publishers globally with its in-house development and editorial teams to optimise their content across the platform. 

The quality of the audience provided by LinkedIn is closely scrutinised by the media. “Even if the numbers are not so big, the results are good. So the relationship with users is better, meaning that there is a possible gain of subscriptions for media on their own platform in the future,” said Ismael Nafría, who noted that many media companies or professionals are now using the platform as a newsletter platform. 

LinkedIn has indeed focused a lot on newsletters, which have become very popular recently. The platform claimed to have seen a “150 percent increase in the number of newsletters, mostly published by publishers and journalists on the platform,” Axios reports. The Wall Street Journal’s Careers & Leadership newsletter, for example, has nearly 3 million subscribers, while the WSJ’s company page has nearly 10 million followers. Newsletters can be native to the platform, mixed with content produced elsewhere, or simply republished.

Media outlets and journalists can also host audio and video events live on LinkedIn, open to all, or to target a special audience. Additionally, sharing content by employees rather than through a company page offers other opportunities to reach different audiences. “This is a good tool for the media. Encouraging your own people, like journalists, designers, and photographers, to share interesting things from your side is a good, interesting, and different way to promote content and reach different kinds of people outside the account of the media companies,” said Nafría.

What about the future?

Like any online platform, one of the challenges remains the redistribution of gain to the media in exchange of using their content, in the context of a media crisis that is not running out of steam. An European Directive, 2019/790 of 17 April 2019, on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market created neighbouring rights for press publishers to be compensated for the uses of their content. However, LinkedIn would not respect it.

“They have been avoiding the application of this text for five years now, it’s a real problem,” said Pierre Petillault, director of the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale, a French organisation that defends the press publishers and negotiated this agreement for France. 

“One of our requests to LinkedIn is to share data about the percentage of news coverage in their content, to have real negotiations. This is what the law says to negotiate neighbouring rights, platforms must be transparent about their use of news publications,” said Petillault, who said they had a few contacts with LinkedIn but without direct follow-up and concrete actions. 

In the meantime, the platform launched a beta test for its wire program in the US, that enables media companies to sell short ads on their editorial video. The program included a deal of 50-50 revenue split between the publisher and LinkedIn, as well as fixed CPM of US$50. The program will be launched internationally, except in the EU, according to Digiday. At the same time, LinkedIn also continues to invest in the Podcast network, created two years ago, which can feature advertising within podcasts and could pay publishers. 

Even if an agreement is reached with LinkedIn, the entire problem would not be totally resolved. “It is clear that this does not compensate for the loss of business for publishers, which is due to the capture of advertising by these platforms. It is an imperfect tool in neighbouring rights but which is still there,” said Petillault. The Fix has tried to reach LinkedIn, without success. 

Source of the cover photo: Linkedin Office in Toronto, Canada, 2 June 2016 via Rawpixel, CC0 1.0 Universal

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