LinkedIn Shuts Down Stories

LinkedIn announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down its ephemeral Stories product. The company plans to "remove the current Stories experience by the end of September," as per Liz Li, senior director of product. The Snapchat-style video Stories were initially launched in February 2020 in internal testing.

The reason behind the shutdown of the stories is that LinkedIn learned users just didn't want disappearing videos. "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 step follows Twitter's shutdown of Fleets, its Stories-like product, in July. Similar to LinkedIn, Twitter observed that users didn't respond to ephemeral videos in the way it expected. "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 as we hoped."

The two shutdowns could hint at a broader pullback from ephemeral video products among social media companies. However, it doesn't look like Snapchat or Instagram will be giving up on their Stories products anytime soon.

Now we need to wait and watch which social media companies step back from their Clubhouse clones. If you were guessing, yes, LinkedIn is working on one of those.