In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites. The announcement will be made at the top of the hour, but the integration is live now.
LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.
We're big on LinkedIn here at RWW and though a wide open developers platform has yet to emerge, moves like this are inspiring. The deal is an important step beyond the previous integration of sharing hooks on NYTimes.com from other services.
A number of other social networks and bookmarking services have "share this story" links on NYT stories, but it's unclear how much traction those links alone are getting. Last month we wrote about one of those services, social news site Mixx, that's still seeing fewer than 1 million unique visitors per month despite "share this on Mixx" buttons on a long list of the biggest news sites in the world, including NYTimes.com.
How much more compelling is this partnership? We think it's a lot more compelling; check out the screenshots below and imagine the feedback loop this could create between the NYT and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 25 million registered users and the NYT sees 17 million + unique visitors per month, but the partnership will need none the less to introduce more people to LinkedIn in order to really be a home run. See this NYT page for an "introduction to LinkedIn." That's pretty classy, though it's unclear yet when that link will be displayed and when it won't.
We'll see how the recommendation process works; we hope it doesn't rely exclusively only on explicitly shared links, but we'll see. This certainly gets the mental juices flowing about any number of other integration and recommendation possibilities.
One question we have is about money changing hands. There has been extensive discussion around the web of late about LinkedIn using partnerships as a revenue source and it wouldn't surprise us if the NYT is paying for this integration. LinkedIn may not be a huge social network, but its user demographics are some of the most financially desirable in the world.
We expect to see more partnerships like this emerge, perhaps from a chastised Facebook attempting to relaunch its Beacon program in a more acceptable fashion.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
Ho hum --- calm down this is trivial!
Posted by: jenkins | July 21, 2008 8:31 PM
It is very interesting. I was just telling my co-worker, since Facebook is launching their new profile, lets see what news LinkedIn is going to release this week. For the last 4 months or so, every time Facebook announces something, LinkedIn comes out with their announcement. Seems like LinkedIn feels insecure about Facebook.
Posted by: Chris Jay | July 21, 2008 8:53 PM
I'll stick with Techmeme and Twitter for news.
Posted by: PJ Brunet | July 21, 2008 10:14 PM
Interesting partnership. I'm a big fan of the gray lady and also own a linkedin profile. good to see them working together to provide me with more relevant content.
Posted by: BJ | July 21, 2008 10:42 PM
Two and two make four. This is really good initiative and both parties will possibly get maximum out of it. I guess, Linkedin will be more safe as it has more serious visitors.
Posted by: Softwaremandi | July 21, 2008 11:36 PM
FT made its content available free of cost on Facebook several months ago. To students. Catch them young and all?
It is worth wondering which strategy is better and if FT were to offer their content to LinkedIn, where this partnership with NYT might go.
LI does have a serious, business focused membership - well at least they do serious business stuff on LI - so this was a missed boat for FT perhaps? Or will there be some jostling to be seen?
Posted by: Shefaly | July 22, 2008 12:08 AM
The strategy of the new york times is very interesting in general to see how an "old" media can face the challenge of the Internet.
This post shows a further step in their brillant strategy, I analysed last week in a post called "Act like your enemy".
http://tiny.cc/wHBhF
Posted by: stetoscope | July 22, 2008 1:59 AM
Doesn't seem that crazy of an integration, simply a configured widget based on the industry categorization of LinkedIn profiles.
This integration would be a lot more exciting to me if it was in a business publication like the Wall Street Journal due to LinkedIn's business context.
Posted by: Lou Paglia
|
July 22, 2008 4:12 AM
It will be intresting to see how it evolves. Do you have any other details about the deal?
Posted by: Harish Agrawal | July 22, 2008 4:28 AM
"In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites."
Are you there press agent ?
Posted by: Frederick | July 22, 2008 5:57 AM
linkedin.com and realmatch.com were just added to the About.com Top 10 employment sites list: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm
Posted by: Amanda Kennedy | July 22, 2008 6:33 AM
Seems like a sensible partnership to me. People who use a serious social network reading a serious newspaper.
Posted by: nyctek | July 22, 2008 7:22 AM
lol, sorry if my enthusiasm goes overboard in this post but I like stuff like this a lot. personalized content recommendations based on social networking profile is a really strong deal to make, imho, and a sign of things to come in the future.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
July 22, 2008 7:24 AM
LinkedIn has been doing a bunch of things around news which is great to see, because it is a business network the value of news is high (for examples see the submit and article and share news )
I think the biggest problem they had was that the content was weak, so partnering with NYT is a step in the right direction.
What i would like to see (in NYT,WSJ and the hundreds of other online news resources) is the following:
When i am reading an online news article, and a name is mentioned (e.g. the name a VP of eCommerce at a specific company)i would like for it to be recognized as a 'personal name' entity and my LinkedIn connections to that person be displayed. This could be a browser based tool that perhaps LinkedIn offers if they can manage to do the entity extraction themselves, or something like a mouseover if the content provide is doing the identification themselves.
Now that would be useful.
Posted by: daniela barbosa | July 22, 2008 9:34 AM
I think this is indeed a very powerful notion - too bad that NYT got there first instead of The Wall Street Journal.
Now LinkedIn needs is an ability to post articles on ones profile instead of just sending it to people. Viral loops etc etc
Posted by: Mrinal | July 22, 2008 11:20 AM
If I understand this "content partnership," I can now alert selected contacts about New York Times news stories in lieu of visiting the NY Times' website and forwarding selected stories to my contacts.
I can see the usefulness of this feature for LinkedIn groups but it seems redundant for individual users, most of whom I presume either read the Times or comparable content in other newspapers.
Posted by: Ari Herzog
|
July 22, 2008 12:20 PM
I think that this development by the New York Times and LinkedIn is an example of the kind of innovation and partnerships we'll see more of in the future.
Traditional media and publishing firms need to innovate - providing new ways of getting content to their readers. At the same time social networks have a real depth of quality data from their members and should be looking to monetise this.
Whether it's good or not for the New York Times readers, I suspect we'll see similar partnerships in the future. And perhaps it might just be beneficial to us for all that content we add into social networks to be used to tailor how we interact with other sites.
I wrote a bit more about this here if you're interested at all:
http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/07/new-york-times-and-linkedin-tie-up/
Matt Rhodes
FreshNetworks
Posted by: Matt Rhodes | July 22, 2008 2:15 PM
Marshall said...
personalized content recommendations based on social networking profile
I believe that NYT is already using content recommendation to its online users. I can't remember where I read about it on the internet. NYT is obviously trying to reach out to more online readers.
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | July 23, 2008 1:07 AM
Marshall, what do you make of the FT-Facebook integration way before NYT-LinkedIn? And do you think this was clever of FT or a missed opportunity?
Having been given WSJ practically free when I lived in the continent (Europe), I know what I would pay for and it is not the WSJ.
Thanks.
Posted by: Shefaly | July 23, 2008 7:10 AM