LinkedIn's publishing platform expands beyond English to Portuguese; German and French to follow
LinkedIn is expanding its publishing platform beyond English today, with the news that it's launching a version for Portuguese speakers. — LinkedIn's evolution as a publishing platform …
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn's publishing platform has been expanding in waves all year: it opened to all English-speaking members — some 230 million people — in January, then added post analytics in May. Today's Portuguese launch is the first break from that English-only base, with German and French versions already promised.
The move matters because publishing is becoming LinkedIn's core product rather than a profile accessory: within a year the company would be in talks with publishers about an Instant Articles-style offering, and by 2017 it would run human-curated trending topics. Going multilingual is what turns those ambitions into a global media play.
First-order effects
- Portuguese-speaking members can now publish long-form posts natively, and LinkedIn's content inventory immediately grows beyond the English-language pool its analytics tools were built on.
Second-order effects
- Any publisher partnerships of the kind LinkedIn was reportedly exploring need a bigger addressable audience to pencil out, so multilingual distribution raises the stakes for both sides of those negotiations.
Third-order effects
- If the German and French rollouts follow, LinkedIn's editorial operations have to scale per language — a path that ends at the multilingual newsroom of hundreds of editors and writers across dozens of countries the platform runs today, and positions it as a competitor to local publishers for professional audiences.
The trend: LinkedIn is converting a networking utility into a multilingual publishing and news platform, one language market at a time.