Back in 2012, LinkedIn acquired its presentation platform SlideShare. However, this year LinkedIn has sold off the presentation platform to the eBook publishing platform Scribd.

Anyhow, terms of the deal were not made public.

According to the eBook publishing platform Scribd “Today, Scribd’s premium subscription service offers over 1,000,000 professionally published ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, sheet music, and magazines, alongside over 100 million documents uploaded from our community. These documents include information and educational resources like study guides, business templates, academic papers, public court filings, and more. Now, with the acquisition of SlideShare, we’re excited to add over 40 million presentations to the Scribd reading ecosystem.”

Back in 2012 when LinkedIn acquired SlideShare, it was a way for professionals to showcase their content in connection with their LinkedIn presence.

Anyhow, since then LinkedIn has made sure to add various SlideShare integration options, and according to Scribd, it is hopeful that the connections between SlideShare and LinkedIn remain in place.

LinkedIn Sells SlideShare:

The question is why would LinkedIn sell SlideShare?

The answer is LinkedIn’s performance numbers remain solid, as well as continuing to see a steady increased in user engagement and revenue, the platform also weathering the economic impacts of the COVID-19 downturn.

Last month, LinkedIn made an announcement that it would be reducing its global workforce by a percentage of 6%, largely due to the slowdown in job listing besides recruitment activity.

Moreover, at that time, new LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky explained: “To continue adapting and accelerating the company like we have been, we need to ensure we are focusing our efforts and resources against our most strategic priorities to set up the company for success today – and well into the future. When we took a hard look at the business, we decided we needed to make some hard calls.”

It looks like that SlideShare was also a victim of this assessment, and while SlideShare will remain independent, and according to the eBook publishing platform Scribd, you would expect the transition to have some impacts on the business.

Anyhow, for regular users and at this stage looks like nothing will actually change, however, it is worth it to keep an eye on any updates from SlideShare as it separrates from LinkedIn and of course that is necessary especially if you are hosting SlideShare content on your LinkedIn Profile.