News Corp to buy LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is firmly in the mainstream. Most of its users are mature professionals and it has a healthy number of early adopters. These people are gradually abandoning recruitment advertising in newspapers. Instead they use LinkedIn and sites like it - even, increasingly, Facebook - to build their professional network and advance their careers. In particular, LinkedIn appeals to the top of the professional market because older business people have a tougher time seeing the value of Facebook’s wackiness. News Corporation, headed by the shrewd Rupert Murdoch, owns some of the premier advertising properties aimed at top-tier professionals including The Wall Street Journal and (in the UK) The Times and The Sunday Times. (Murdoch was smart enough to buy MySpace when it was ‘just’ $580m in 2005, long before the billions associated with Facebook).

In the new environment of professional online networking Newspaper classified advertising is becoming an anachronism (as I have argued in the distant past), and this trend is reflected in the decline of the advertising market in the newspaper sector. Newspaper advertising is plummeting in the US, down 7.4 per cent year on year. In the UK classified advertising was down 8 per cent in 2006 and will decrease further this year, according to a forecast by media-buying network Zenith Optimedia. Meanwhile online spending grew by more than 41 per cent in 2006 to just over £2 billion, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau.