When someone clicks on an ad, well . . . we all know he or she’s not exactly making a binding show of interest. When someone tries to read a 10,000-word nonfiction text document, on the other hand, he’s committing a fair amount of time to the author. So LinkedIn is implementing the somewhat clever idea of making white papers act as ads.
Erick Schonfeld points out that LinkedIn “knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in.” Then, “LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.”
If all goes according to plan, this could turn into a very efficient way of connecting companies to interested parties. LinkedIn might also make a fair amount of money off the move, since Schonfeld reports that each lead should net it somewhere between $40 and $100.
The one problem would be if people ignore the white papers because they use LinkedIn while off the clock. It’s not exactly brilliant to be surfing a professional networking site when your boss can pop in at any moment, after all, and when the workday is over, most people lose the desire to do extensive research.
But we’ll see what happens. As the above picture shows, VMware, with its market cap of $10.68 billion, apparently has enough confidence in the idea to become involved.
