LinkedIn is shutting down its ephemeral Stories product, the company announced Tuesday. The company plans to “remove the current Stories experience by the end of September,” according to Liz Li, senior director of product. The Snapchat-style video Stories were first launched in February 2020 in internal testing.
Part of the reason for the shutdown is that LinkedIn learned users just didn’t want disappearing video. “In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting,” Li said. “Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise.”
LinkedIn’s move follows Twitter’s shutdown of Fleets, its Stories-like product, in July. Like LinkedIn, Twitter observed that users didn’t respond to ephemeral video in the way it had wanted. “We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product, said on Twitter’s blog. “But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped.”
The two shutdowns could signal a broader pullback from ephemeral video products among social media companies. However, it seems unlikely that Snapchat or Instagram will be giving up on their Stories products anytime soon.
Now we just have to wait and see which social media companies step back from their Clubhouse clones. If you were wondering, yes, LinkedIn is working on one of those.
