LinkedIn is testing a paid hosting service for online events

Microsoft’s platform doesn’t stop developing. Within this development, it tests new features that can monetize very quickly in the future. For now, these are only tests on a small number of users, but if they come out successfully, we will witness a big novelty served to the users of the service.

When organizing information, it is worth realizing What LinkedIn is anyway. Well, it is a platform for for professional and business purposes. It has a range of uses from promotional, advertising to revenue or even relationship. Translating this into user segments – the stakeholders of the app are people looking for employment, people looking for employees, people representing their institutions, the institutions themselves, and people running businesses, startups or freelancers. LinkedIn is also an educational platform, where we can find a number of interesting facts and tips from industry professionals.

Learn, learn!

The educational nature of LinkedIn is a feature that the new idea of the platform’s creators addresses. They want to introduce a solution that we can associate with such places as coursera or myvod.io. LinkedIn’s new feature is to give the ability to host paid course and training videos, so-called e-learning, on their server, making it a platform that hosts this content. Of course, the service has a daughter platform known as In Learning that holds a similar task, however, the ability to charge users directly through the portal is also being tested.

Learning to wallet key!

As reported by the Bloomberg portal.com, so far the tests have covered a very small number of people, and the corporation is not sure about the future of this service. So it does not specify the potential extension of the tests, and even less does it give possible prices. Although who knows, maybe it’s just the calm before the storm, or maybe it’s actually a slight flop. After all, the authorities “blue businessman” in social applications have already decided to withdraw from at least daily coverage, known on snapchat or in the facebook ecosystem. The reason proved to be low profitability and user engagement with the feature.

LinkedIn Events?

Although the portal is abandoning some solutions, others even look promising. We are talking here about LinkedIn Events, the interest in which has proven to be very developmental, as to the legitimacy of its existence. The pandemic, which has forced us to look for solutions and deeper digitization, may have a significant impact here, but LinkedIn as a beneficiary has no reason to complain. Following the article of Bloomberg twenty-one million people took part in one of the events of the platform in 2020.

“We continue to learn from member and customer feedback and test new ways to improve the experience,” stated LinkedIn’s leadership – “As part of this, we are exploring payment options in the Events product based on feedback from event organizers.”.

3-year „retaliation”

It took a long time to develop the feature, as it had been in development since 2018, but finally the online scheduling of personal events directly through LinkedIn has been refined. Pandemic, of course, as part of the usual correlation, again proved to be a helping hand for the company here. The feature improvement was to discover native live streaming for the service. This way of streaming allows virtual event hosts to be better served. Following suit, in 2021 the portal allowed users to advertise their own events.

LinkedIn is pushing forward

As reported by TechCrunch, the company is strongly catching up with the competition. The platform already has capabilities for creators that give users a number of changes regarding profile personalization. Creators still have access to Stories , LinkedIn Live video streaming , or newsletters. LinkedIn is now working not only on forms of payment, but also on audio-only functionality, which is to resemble the solution from Clubhouse, but at the same time be more original to the platform.

“We’re seeing a nearly 50% increase in conversations on LinkedIn, which is reflected in stories, videos shared and posts on the platform,” – said a LinkedIn spokeswoman, confirming the expansion of the audio feature. “We are doing some early testing to create a unique audio experience related to your professional identity. And we’re looking at how we can bring the audio to other parts of LinkedIn, such as events and groups, to give our members even more opportunities to connect with their community,” Owens said.

Developer leaks

Returning to Bloomberg, it reveals that in the beta version, in the code of the update for the iPhone we can find just the functionalities for managing payments, selling tickets and generating earnings as an organizer. It could also give a potential opportunity for users to buy tickets. “By leaving this event, you will lose the opportunity to attend and your ticket will not be refunded.” – we read in one of the scheduled messages to the system. “If you have any questions, please contact the organizer.”

I do not hide the fact that LinkedIn is in my subjective opinion one of the most interesting social networks already giving in its assumption of great opportunities. Examples include the ability for personal branding and job listings. It will be interesting to see its further growth in a particular direction. It is important to realize that while LinkedIn is currently drawing on trends for all social media, its specifics are so unique and different that no solution is obvious here.