SOURCES: Microsoft Looking to Acquire Upwork

December 17, 2018

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LinkedIn reported record job-posting activity by business clients, as was a 41% increase in user sessions; that’s better than a March quarter level of “over 30%.” LinkedIn now has over 575 million registered members, up from 46

7 million in September 2016. While not all of these members are active users, the professional user data that collectively provided by their profiles has tremendous value for both LinkedIn’s business as well as other parts of Microsoft’s empire.

If LinkedIn were to acquire Upwork, it would likely offer Upwork to its 575 million registered users. Currently Upwork has a little over 12 million registered freelancers and 5 million registered clients, so even incremental adoption via LinkedIn would exponentially grow the size of Upwork.

From a business standpoint, Upwork and LinkedIn is a 1 + 1 = 10. LinkedIn is predicated on an old school model of hiring full-time employees. The market has seen a major shift to freelancers, or contractors if you will.

Accordingly to Upwork, “labor is undergoing a revolution.”