Rumor mill Newscorp to purchase Linkedin

The rumor coming off of Techcrunch UK today is that Newscorp is in talks to purchase Linkedin. While this will end up being good for Linkedin who can walk away with a big enough payday to go do something else, this bodes poorly for users of Linkedin who are familiar with the disaster that is MySpace, which is owned by Newscorp.

Linkedin has a clean interface, if they go to the 15 ad per page model that Newscorp uses on MySpace, there will no longer be a compelling reason to use Linkedin, nor will the user experience be anything nice, clean and simple. Nice clean and simple works, it works well. While there is nothing wrong with monetizing a web site, there are clear benefits to not going overboard like many web sites seem to do.

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. Techcrunch UK

In all it makes sense, but this is also a different audience than MySpace, Linkedin has a number of high profile people, is more business oriented, and baring the occasional problem, this is not a web site filled with 20 something’s hell bent on drinking booze, and posting said pictures on the internet. Linkedin has a more professional appearance, caters to the business world, and needs to remain that way. This means that advertising is OK, but has to be taken in small chunks and not detract from the entire experience.

While no one argues that Rupert Murdoch is a smart shrewd person, the hope here is that if and when Linkedin is purchased by anyone, that they can keep the same look and feel of the web site. Otherwise, all those folks on it now will figure out that it is time to bail, when the advertising takes away from the fundamental user experience.