LinkedIn is once again driving big traffic to publishers
At Forbes, for example, traffic from LinkedIn increased 127 percent from July to December last year (it wouldn’t share exact numbers). Forbes has found an effective formula on the platform, where it posts around 12 stories and quotes each day and has 1.2 million followers. But the biggest spike in traffic came last month, almost overnight. “We’ve done things to build our audience there, but they’ve clearly done things on their end and it’s benefiting not just us but everyone,” said Forbes chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin.
The referral picture is the same at The Financial Times, Inc. and Business Insider, the latter of which reports a 300 percent increase in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past month. Business Insider president Julie Hansen said the increase came as a surprise to the site, which hasn’t changed its LinkedIn strategy to attract more readers there. The increases at both Business Insider and Forbes reflect the larger spikes in referrals coming from LinkedIn over the past two months. Parsely looked at its data and found that LinkedIn referrals made up as much as a quarter of a percent of the December traffic sent to publishers on its network. That’s still tiny overall, and reflects the fact that the network includes more than just business publishers, but it’s up from a five hundredths of a percent in July.
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