The timing on this is truly spooky. I logged into the Authentia SlideShare account this morning to take a look at the statistics for our latest upload, The Finely Tuned Sales and Marketing Machine. I was pleasantly surprised that it received more than 600 views in just a week! I wanted to see the analytics that I am accustomed to seeing with other Slideshare PRO accounts, so I went looking for the “Upgrade” button.
I couldn’t find it anywhere.
In fact, I had to leave the SlideShare website and do a Google search to find an innocuous help article stating that they were working on changes to the platform and that they had temporarily stopped accepting new subscriptions to the PRO platform.
Just a few hours later, I received an email from SlideShare regarding one of my other PRO accounts. Here’s what it said:
When we launched PRO, we wanted to empower users like you to have ways to better market your content. With detailed content analytics, features to generate high-quality leads and additional upload options such as video and private uploads, we have seen PRO become a powerful tool.
As a result, we’ve decided to make key PRO features free to all users. Analytics, Private Uploads, Videos and Profile Customization will be rolled out to all users in the coming months. Starting early next year, Leadshare will be rolled into LinkedIn’s enterprise solution (SlideShare is a LinkedIn company). Until that time, you will continue to have access to this tool at no additional cost. As part of this effort, we will also be discontinuing some smaller features to invest our resources towards creating even better experiences for you on SlideShare.
I did some more clicking and searching and they’ve also launched some new pages on the site, including a list of new Slideshare features.
Slideshare PRO Features for Free
Clearly, the purchase by LinkedIn is creating a new mission for SlideShare. It’s now one smaller part of a huge revenue generating machine and doesn’t have quite as much pressure as it did to sign up pro customers. As such, the following features will now be free to all SlideShare users:
Analytics
For us digital marketers, analytics are highly addictive. If you’re not familiar with their analytics platform, they provide the following insights:
- They show you total views for all of your uploads collectively and individually. These can be separated out by embedded and on-site views.
- You can see how many “actions” were performed, including outbound clicks, favorites, comments, downloads, and email shares.
- Traffic sources will tell you how and where your presentations were found (e.g. search, social, referral, SlideShare, etc.).
Video Uploads
Free users will now be able to upload high definition videos up to 500BM in size. This will come in really handy for spicing up your LinkedIn profile! Marketers will also be able to upload product demonstration videos to their company pages (presumably).
Private Uploads
If you’ve got a presentation that isn’t quite ready for public consumption yet or just something you want to share with a select group, you can use private uploads. This feature also allows you to limit embedded views to specific domains, like company intranets for example.
Profile Customization
Free users will be able to create a custom brand identity with custom banner images, showcase your best/favorite content, and create content for your followers.
What’s NOT Free?
The most powerful feature of SlideShare pro accounts is the ability to collect leads from your presentations. This feature will be free for existing PRO users until the end of the year, after which it will be bundled in with LinkedIn’s enterprise solution. This makes complete sense and will extend LinkedIn’s value proposition of generating leads for businesses. Now, in addition to being the go-to tool for recruitment, they’ve taken another step toward their goal of making it a much broader business marketing platform.
Click here to learn more about these new SlideShare PRO features.
And here’s the presentation we uploaded that seems to have caught fire in the past few days: