 "LinkedIn acquires Pulse news reader app for around $90 million")
The rumours were true! LinkedIn has gone ahead and finalised the purchase of mobile news reader app Pulse. The company made the acquisition public today.
In a blog post titled “Welcome Pulse to the LinkedIn Family", Deep Nishar of LinkedIn lauded Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari of Pulse with praises as he announced the acquisition of the app. The deal was reportedly valued at a figure somewhere close to $90 million, which consists of 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash, according to the official release.
It was earlier speculated that the deal would go through for anywhere between $50 million to $100 million. Reports had revealed that heavyweights like Yahoo! and Microsoft were vying to purchase the app, the latter having worked with Pulse on a mobile web app, but LinkedIn turned out to be the winner here.
LinkedIn finally acquires Pulse
Nishar wrote that Pulse could be “the perfect complement” to LinkedIn’s vision of becoming the definitive publishing platform, “where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content.”
Pulse is a pretty popular news reading app directly in competition with the likes of Flipboard and Summly. The app provides news content from a wide variety of publications like BBC, The New Yorker, TMZ and NBC News.
The app has a strong backing of 30 million readers who browse through more than 10 million stories per day, which is primarily what Pulse will be bringing to the table. The app has readers in more than 190 countries and more than 750 leading publishers from around the world put out their content on Pulse. LinkedIn could be vying not just for the large user base, but also the wide range of platforms the app covers.
Nishar wrote that LinkedIn was going to be working “side by side with the Pulse team to create new and better ways to help professionals contribute to and leverage this collective body of business knowledge to help them be great at what they do and from wherever they work.”
“News—the people, the places, the stories—is part of our daily conversation. Over the past three years, Pulse has established itself as a key part of that conversation; it has grown from a small project, to a platform for millions of readers to access their favorite content,” said Kothari. Gupta added, “Now that our team is part of LinkedIn, we’ll work together to expand the possibilities for content discovery, helping readers engage in conversations with colleagues, mentors, industry leaders, and beyond.”
If you’ve been an avid Pulse reader, this acquisition is nothing to be worried about – for now. The app is going to remain in its current state as the integrated Pulse and LinkedIn teams “work to build future generations of professional consumption products.”
The Pulse team will soon be downing shutters at its office and moving to LinkedIn’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Does this mean we could be seeing a whole new product from the LinkedIn-Pulse stable? Watch this space!
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