Viadeo

» see viadeo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the professional-network slot in my life only ever had one occupant, and it was linkedin. viadeo was france's version of the same idea, and a good one, but it lived on the other side of a language and a market from me. in turkey the white-collar internet went straight to the american site. there was no local challenger strong enough to make you choose, and no reason to sign up to a paris network to reach paris employers when you were in ankara.

viadeo started in 2004 under the name viaduc and took its final name in 2006. it did well at home, then decided home was too small. it bought its way outward, taking the canadian network unyk and the chinese network tianji, and by 2014 it claimed sixty-five million members, a quarter of them in china.

the global bet is what broke it. the 2014 stock listing did not raise what viadeo needed, and private money never filled the gap. china, the supposed prize, cost far more than it ever returned. viadeo pulled out of china and closed its california data center. by late 2016 it was in front of a commercial court in paris, and on 29 november the court placed it under receivership. le figaro's classifieds arm bought the french activities for one and a half million euros, a rounding error against what the company had once been worth.

~ the record ~

~ the china problem ~

the numbers that made viadeo look global were mostly the numbers that killed it. tianji, the chinese arm, carried tens of millions of members but burned cash and never turned into the business viadeo needed to justify a public listing. it is an old lesson in professional networks. members are cheap and paying members are rare. a network abroad is worth nothing if the recruiters stay home.

~ what it became ~

figaro kept a french viadeo running in a diminished form, a jobs-and-profiles directory folded into a media group rather than a company chasing the world. the thing that had raised real money and opened offices across continents was finished. what survived carried the name and almost none of the ambition, which is its own kind of death.

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