LinkedIn announced Tuesday that it will shut down its ephemeral Stories service. According to Liz Li (senior director of product), the company will remove the existing Stories experience by September. In internal testing, the Snapchat-style video Stories first launched in February 2020.
LinkedIn discovered that users didn't want any disappearing videos, which is why the shutdown was necessary. Li explained that Stories was developed because we believed people wouldn't want informal videos attached directly to their profiles and that this would lower the barriers people feel about posting. It turns out that you want to make lasting videos that tell your professional story in an intimate way, and showcase your expertise and personality.
Following the shutdown of Fleets by Twitter, LinkedIn's move follows.
LinkedIn's decision follows the July shutdown of Fleets (a Stories-like product) by Twitter. Twitter, like LinkedIn, noticed that users weren't responding to ephemeral videos in the way it wanted. Ilya Brown (Twitters vice president for product), stated that we hoped Fleets would make it easier for more people to join the Twitter conversation. We haven't seen the increase in people joining the Fleets conversation since we introduced Fleets, as we had hoped.
These shutdowns could indicate a wider pullback by social media companies from ephemeral videos products. It seems unlikely that Snapchat and Instagram will stop selling Stories anytime soon.
We will now have to wait to see which social media companies abandon their Clubhouse clones. In case you were curious, LinkedIn is currently working on one.
