LinkedIn Acquires SlideShare For $119 Million

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) announced its Q1 2012 earnings on May 3, but that wasn’t the only big announcement it had to make. It revealed that it had acquired SlideShare, one of the most popular online document sharing service, for $119 million in cash and equity. LinkedIn was already working closely with SlideShare as a partner to enable easy sharing of SlideShare presentations on LinkedIn. Given that they both target the same audience — online professionals — this might be a great fit for LinkedIn’s portfolio of offerings. ^[1]

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Integrating SlideShare with LinkedIn’s platform will not only help the company increase engagement on its platform, but also increase the number of monthly unique visitors, directly impacting its advertising and marketing revenue. LinkedIn currently has nearly 107 million monthly unique visitors, while SlideShare has nearly 29 million. Besides the obvious impact on its visitor numbers and marketing revenues, there could be other synergies that could be exploited by LinkedIn to increase the value of its other services.

You can check the impact of any increase in LinkedIn’s unique visitors using the graph below:

Advertising and marketing account for nearly 30% of LinkedIn’s $44 Trefis price estimate, which stands nearly 60% below its market price. LinkedIn competes with Facebook and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) in the social networking space, and Monster (NYSE:MWW) in the online job search market.

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1. SlideShare + LinkedIn = More Value for Professionals, LinkedIn Blog [↩]