New York Times links up with LinkedIn

Thanks Wendy for sharing this post from the guardian. A big move into site convergence based on open-id concepts. Great stuff and a pointer for how publishers should be embracing the social web. I'm sure keeping it as a 'must-activate' function has allayed any data security fears.

• Jemima Kiss
• guardian.co.uk,

The New York Times will be able to serve targeted web stories to business and technology users following a deal with social networking site LinkedIn.

Aiming to strengthen its audience among the business community, NYTimes.com will show five relevant headlines in a right-hand box, with stories selected based on the industry, location, role, company and gender of the user's LinkedIn profile.

A LinkedIn button next to stories will invite users to share and discuss news with contacts on their LinkedIn network.

Users need to activate their LinkedIn account within NYTimes.com to launch the service.

NYTimes.com's objective is to increase the volume of traffic from business executives and the entrepreneurial community, which is a valuable audience for advertisers.

"This relationship expands NYTimes.com's targeting capability and creates a powerful incentive for advertisers to leverage LinkedIn's and NYTimes.com's combined reach of the business community," said Denise Warren, the senior vice-president and chief advertising officer for the New York Times Media Group.

"Advertisers are constantly looking for context, content and quality brands and this approach delivers just that."

LinkedIn claims that 25 million professional people have registered with the site since it launched in May 2003, while measurement firm Nielsen Online estimated that NYTimes.com scored 17.7 million unique users during June.

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