The decline of the era of professional social networks is not far off. How LinkedIn dies before our eyes

It seems that the era of professional social networks is coming to an end. This is evidenced by many facts, which were crowned by the annual report of LinkedIn. In the second quarter, the loss of the social network amounted to 119 million dollars against 68 million dollars a year earlier, which was the worst result of LinkedIn since its IPO in 2011.

What is the cause of the approaching sunset?

The most important reason, in my opinion, is that today the audience is increasingly concentrating on one platform. In the case of a quality audience, this is Facebook. Obviously, the Internet business today operates on the principle of "the winner takes all." It was in the 2000s that we dreamed about the “long tail” of Web 2.0, argued that in the Internet economy there will be a place for everyone. "Here we read the news, order food there, get a job here." Today, such a volume of offers of Internet services already loses all meaning. Even the Pareto principle "80 20" is no longer valid. More likely so: 1% of services accumulate 90% of the income.
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According to research in the New York Times, each LinkedIn user spends only 2 minutes per day on it, whereas on Facebook it’s an average of 50.

Why should I move from site to site if there is one platform where I can satisfy all my needs?
Suppose I am looking for a new job. Okay. On Facebook, I belong to a number of professional groups, where I regularly communicate, publish information. Thus, bored at the old place, I should only publish there an appeal to my colleagues, “Colleagues, help, bored!”. And subject to my good reputation in the professional group, my colleagues will certainly respond. Why do I need LinkedIn in this case? Yes, even with its complex and confusing interface.

Like any busy person, leading a rich lifestyle, I experience a lack of time. And I'm just not physically able to maintain multiple profiles in various social networks. “Then I’m sitting when I am at work, I’m looking for a bride, then when I was fired” - the ideas of the niche social network owners seem to boil down to such an idea about the lifestyle of their audience. What is fundamentally wrong.

One profile for life - sooner or later, the Internet will come to this.

In the morning money - in the evening vacancy

While offline entrepreneurs have long understood that there is no point in transferring their direct selling strategies to online, and Internet services have learned to earn money without directly imposing their products and services on the audience, LinkedIn still has to pay for a lot. If you find yourself in a job search situation, you will have to fork out for one of four types of paid accounts: Job Seeker for $ 29.99, Business Plus for $ 47.99, Sales Navigator Professional for $ 64.99 and Recruiter Lite for $ 99.95. For free, you can only make a profile, add "friends" and update a boring tape, which is 90% of updates to the profiles of "friends." Vicious circle.
As a result, you understand that LinkedIn is not a social network, but a site for posting resumes and selecting personnel with purely external social network attributes, such as a news line.

Explicit security issues

In 2011, for the first time, information appeared about the low level of protection of social network user accounts. Experts have discovered vulnerabilities that allow potential hackers to access personal data. As the independent computer security expert Rishi Narang noted, the technical problem is related to the cookies that are created when the user visits a particular web page. They are stored on the computer and used for re-authorization.

And in May of this year, the hacker under the pseudonym "Peace" put up for sale 117 million logins and passwords of LinkedIn users.

The share of those who “abandoned” their account in professional networks is significant and it becomes easy prey for intruders who either post false information about a job seeker after being hacked or are limited to using his personal data for their own purposes.

Also worth mentioning is all annoying spam. In September 2013, the social network was even accused of stealing user data for its own needs, in particular, the addresses of mailboxes for sending spam. According to a lawsuit, LinkedIn, forcing to specify an email address as a name, accessed the addresses in the user's contact list: the data was used to send invitations to join the network.

So let no one be surprised by LinkedIn's deteriorating performance.