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Friday, April 12, 2013

LinkedIn Buys Pulse While Google Drops Reader

LinkedIn, the social network site for building and sharing business relationships, has announced its plans to broaden into a news aggregation site.  "But more than that, it’s yet another move by LinkedIn to expand beyond being just a static resume service for recruiters and professionals."  Rather than just be a site for job seekers and hunters, LinkedIn can now be defined as an online business resource.  A smart move by LinkedIn to strengthen its relationship with its users.  "It wants to be the home page for professionals, including the place where those pros go to catch up on the biz news they care about."

As LinkedIn builds its monetization plans, both in ad and subscription models, I suspect that they will find away to build a premium version of Pulse to strengthen the LinkedIn subscription model and encourage more free users to upgrade.  The combination of LinkedIn with Pulse should build more synergies with original content that LinkedIn is creating.  And that will help to bolster their ad revenue, too.  All in all, a smart strategic purchase.