LinkedIn says it has sold presentation-sharing service SlideShare to Scribd, which will take over its operation on September 24
SlideShare has a new owner, with LinkedIn selling the presentation-sharing service to Scribd for an undisclosed price. — According to LinkedIn …
TechCrunchAnthony Ha
Context & Ripple Effects
The sale closes a long arc of LinkedIn accumulating and then pruning content-side businesses. It bought its way into presentations with PointDrive, folded into Sales Solutions, while keeping big bets like the $1.5B Lynda.com learning deal inside the core platform.
Divesting is also familiar territory: LinkedIn shut down its off-site ad product after the Bizo purchase, as covered in its retreat from selling ads on other sites. Handing SlideShare to Scribd continues that discipline — keeping the professional graph and learning business, shedding standalone content libraries.
First-order effects
SlideShare's presenters and viewers move under Scribd's operation on September 24, with an undisclosed price leaving LinkedIn booking whatever value remains in a property it no longer treats as strategic.
Scribd takes over an established presentation library and its existing audience, extending its document-subscription footprint beyond books into slide decks.
Second-order effects
Content marketers who used SlideShare for distribution must re-evaluate where decks live, shifting attention toward platforms still owned by the networks they publish on.
Scribd's rivals in document hosting now compete against a service that acquired rather than built its presentation catalog, raising the bar for organic library growth.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, large social platforms will keep shedding decade-old user-generated-content properties to focused niche operators, consolidating the early-social web's archives under smaller, subscription-driven stewards.
The trend: Major social networks are systematically divesting standalone content-sharing properties, transferring the early-2010s web's slide and document libraries to niche subscription operators like Scribd.
SlideShare has a new home! Scribd has acquired SlideShare from LinkedIn. Not surprised by this move... the product had became a pale shadow of its earlier avataar as LinkedIn had stopped investing in its growth. Scribd & SlideShare together clearly is... https://techcrunch.com/..…
Exciting that @Scribd has acquired Slideshare! 🎉 LinkedIn and Microsoft left this once-great platform to rot for the better part of a decade, but it's always had the potential to be amazing. https://twitter.com/...
the largest digital library on the internet! Congrats @tripadler on the acquisition. The two content communities share much in common - hope the M&A integration works out smoothly. Back in the early days of SlideShare we used to track Scribd as a strong competitor...
Wow. This is shocking and wonderful news. Scribd acquired Slideshare from LinkedIn (who ignored the product so badly, I left it for PowerPoint online after 12+ years of loyal use). Fingers crossed they invest in improvements: https://blog.scribd.com/...
We are proud to welcome SlideShare to the Scribd family! Our mission is to change the way the world reads by providing readers with unparalleled access to the world's best content. Today, we're excited to add over 40 million presentations to our reading ecosystem.
Glad to see that @slideshare found a home w @Scribd. That said, I wanted to see it work within @LinkedIn. It made a ton of sense to me as an integrated tool for professional expression. On that note, I hope that @LinkedIn doesn't ship off its blogging feature to @Medium.
LinkedIn drove @SlideShare into the ground and made it irrelevant. Hope @Scribd and @tripadler can bring back some of the social magic. https://techcrunch.com/...
Fond memories of posting decks to @SlideShare then moving on to @SlideRocket and then to @Prezi before adding stars on @github for all those repos that promised frameworks like “markdown to slides” from any browser anytime anywhere... culminating with @revealjs becoming @slides🤔 …