A few weeks ago, LinkedIn acquired its first company. LinkedIn is now following that up with the acquisition of a second company - ChoiceVendor, which is a startup that provides ratings and reviews of B2B service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States. The ChoiceVendor acquisition indicates that LinkedIn is serious about monetizing its company profile pages.
LinkedIn has built a huge database of professional profiles (75 Million as of this writing) on its site. And it has been successful it monetizing this database by offering recruiters tools to mine the profiles. LinkedIn has followed up professional profiles with company profiles, of which it boasts a total of ~1M, most of which by definition are for small and medium sized businesses. Currently, LinkedIn does not seem to be monetizing the company profile pages - these pages (see here for an example) have a fair amout of information useful to potential employees, but no obvious ads, upsell pitches and the like.
Ratings and reviews on company profiles parallel the "recommendations" on people profiles. Done right, company ratings and reviews would build confidence in a B2B transaction between a professional seeking a service and the SMB providing the service. Assuming that such transactions increase service provider searches and company profile views, LinkedIn can monetize the traffic via context sensitive Ads. Further, LinkedIn can charge the SMBs for the privilege of including ratings and reviews on their company profiles or the professionals for tools (folders, LinkedIn mails for additional information, etc) that facilitate their research.
If LinkedIn is successful in souping up company profiles and making them stick, it has the potential for becoming a major online marketplace for B2B transactions - it can eventually broker B2B transactions and take a cut from each transaction. That would place LinkedIn on a collision course with Elance - a company that has been facilitating such transactions for close to 10 years. Does that make Elance a future acquisition target for LinkedIn?
0 comments:
Post a Comment