Business networking site LinkedIn is to buy presentation sharing site Slideshare for $118.75 million (£73.5 Million).
Slideshare is the business presentation equivalent of YouTube and allows users to upload and share Microsoft Powerpoint and other slide presentations with other business users, either on the Slideshare site or embedded on blogs, websites and shared on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
The advantage of Slideshare over putting a presentation on your own site is threefold, you get to share in the huge traffic that comes through Slideshare, there's no potential bandwidth costs to your business, and download speeds are much greater than on your own site.
Besides presentations, SlideShare also hosts documents, PDFs, videos and webinars
Founded in 2006 the website gets around 29 million unique visitors a month, who view around 140 million pages of presentations, from over 9 million different presentations, embedded across more than 1.4 million websites. Registered users can also download presentations – the second most popular downloaded presentation is called 'Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it)' with over 97,000 downloads and 1.9 million views.
As part of the deal LinkedIn also gets access to Zipcast a social web conferencing system that allows presenters to broadcast an audio/video feed while driving the presentation through the Internet.
This week, LinkedIn also released its financial result for the first quarter. Revenue was $188.5 million (£116 million), an increase of 101 percent compared to the first quarter last year, unsurprisingly this presentation is currently the 'Presentation of the day' on Slideshare's home page.
