LinkedIn Will Acquire Business Marketing Company Bizo For $175M
LinkedIn just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Bizo, a company that helps advertisers reach businesses and professionals. — LinkedIn says the deal is worth around $175 million — 90 percent cash and 10 percent stock.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bizo is the third nine-figure purchase in LinkedIn's two-year buying streak, following SlideShare for $119 million in 2012 and the $120 million Bright deal in February, and it lands just a week after the smaller Newsle acquisition closed. Where SlideShare added content and Bright added job-matching data, Bizo adds the demand side: a company whose entire business is helping advertisers reach business audiences.
The pickup was unusually broad for a mid-sized deal — the New York Times, MarketWatch, VentureBeat, ZDNet and ad-trade outlets like AdExchanger all carried it on announcement day — which reflects what LinkedIn is really buying: permission to sell professional-audience targeting outside its own site, at a moment when it is also pushing hard on mobile apps for jobs and contacts.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions unit immediately gains Bizo's B2B advertiser roster and its off-site display and retargeting technology, letting LinkedIn monetize its 300 million professional profiles on pages it does not own.
- Bizo's existing B2B clients now have their campaigns run through LinkedIn's sales channel, folding a standalone ad platform into a much larger seller.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, Google and Twitter, all competing for the same brand and demand-gen budgets, face a rival that can target by job title, seniority and company — data they cannot replicate from social graphs alone.
- Ad-tech firms serving B2B marketers lose one of the few independent platforms built specifically for business audiences, pushing those budgets toward walled gardens.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, professional identity becomes a targeting asset traded well beyond the résumé site itself, with LinkedIn evolving from a network you visit into an audience marketplace other publishers plug into.
- The deal extends LinkedIn's acquisition-led expansion strategy — content, data, now advertising infrastructure — toward a full-stack marketing business layered on top of its recruiting core.
The trend: LinkedIn is assembling a B2B marketing stack through serial acquisitions, converting its professional-graph data into an advertising business that reaches beyond its own site.