WSJ drops LinkedIn share button

The Wall Street Journal is no longer allowing its articles to be shared on LinkedIn, writes Lucia Moses of Digiday.

Moses writes, “Apparently severing ties with LinkedIn isn’t an edict yet in News Corp, as its share button still appears on Barron’s stories.

“LinkedIn has fluctuated as a referral source for publishers, once sending lots of referral traffic to them, then dialing it back last year. At the same time, it’s become more of a competitor to them as it’s prioritized exposure for its own contributor network. But the irony of the Journal move is that it happened around the same time that LinkedIn started sending more traffic to publishers. Publishers’ LinkedIn referral traffic comes partly from their readers sharing articles to LinkedIn, leading users to click back to the publishers’ site. So removing the article share button seems likely to reduce any referral traffic the Journal was getting from LinkedIn.

“It’s likely not a big loss, though, as sharing to LinkedIn generally represents a small percent of content shared as Facebook continues to dominate as the preferred way people share content. The number of articles shared to LinkedIn from publisher sites is only 1.6 percent for all publishers, but 10 percent for business publishers, according to ShareThis, which puts share buttons on publishers’ sites.

“A LinkedIn rep struck a conciliatory tone, saying, ‘The Wall Street Journal is a very important publisher to us, and we want to continue to work with them.'”

Read more here.