LinkedIn Starts Building a Syndicated Content Network

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LinkedIn has gotten a lot of mileage out of the free content that famous people like Richard Branson write for the social network. Now it wants to get more: The company wants to syndicate that content for publication on other sites. LinkedIn is e-mailing the 500 people it calls its “Influencers” and asking them for permission to automatically hand their stuff to other sites that want to republish it in full.

Sites like Quartz routinely publish LinkedIn posts, but right now each article has to be manually approved by the author, which makes it a multistep process. There’s no money trading hands here -- Influencers write for LinkedIn for free, and LinkedIn lets other sites use those posts for free -- but there’s still an obvious value exchange: Influencers get more distribution for their names and ideas, along with the notion that LinkedIn says they are “influencers.” And LinkedIn gets to advertise LinkedIn. Still, assuming LinkedIn gets most of its heavy hitters to opt in to this, it could be a good head start on what might be an interesting content syndication business, with obvious opportunities for revenue share and other money-making schemes.


LinkedIn Starts Building a Syndicated Content Network