LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Milestone
- by Mark Walsh @markfwal, October 14, 2009
LinkedIn has quietly climbed to 50 million users, the social networking site for professionals announced Wednesday. Highlighting its continuing growth, the company noted that it took almost a year and four months to notch its first million users after launching in 2003, but only 12 days to add its last million.
"Where are these 50 million users? LinkedIn has been global since inception -- about half of our total membership is international," wrote CEO Jeff Weiner on the company blog. "There are now 11 million users in Europe alone. India is currently our fastest-growing country with almost 3 million users, while the Netherlands has the highest rate of adoption per capita outside the U.S., at 30%."
While LinkedIn is becoming a global phenomenon in its own right, there's no question it has been overshadowed by the even faster growth of Facebook, which recently hit 300 million users. Having been around for six years, it's also no competition to Twitter as the social media platform of the moment.
But unlike those broader social networking services, LinkedIn is further along in creating a stable business model based on advertising, subscriptions and e-commerce. The company was valued at about $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable in recent years, according to TechCrunch.
While LinkedIn has actually benefited from the recession by attracting laid-off executives seeking out contacts and job leads, whether that growth has translated into increased revenue is another question. This spring, Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn's head of sales told Online Media Daily that inventory wasn't being monetized as it would be in an "amazing economy," but that the company felt very good heading into the second quarter.
Online classified advertising has been among the categories hardest-hit by the recession. The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported last week that classified ad dollars were down 31% in the first six months of 2009 compared to the year-earlier period. Overall online ad spending in the first half of the year dropped 5.3% from a year ago to $10.9 billion.
Hi Mark -
Thanks for the coverage. We're excited about this announcement and the opportunity that it represents for marketers; with 50M members and growing by 1 million every 12 days, the LinkedIn community is now one of the largest concentrated audiences of professionals in the world.
We're also excited about the momentum that we're seeing in our advertising business. While this has been a very challenging year for publishers large and small, our ad revenues are up more than 50% year over year and our growth in ad sales has been accelerating in the second half of the year. This growth is being fueled by a wide range of well-respected brand marketers: technology advertisers looking to reach IT decision makers, travel marketers looking to reach mobile professionals, corporate advertisers looking to reach business executives, and consumer advertisers looking to reach affluent and successful individuals.
Moreover, any inventory that we're not selling to well-known brand advertisers is being very effectively monetized through our self-serve DirectAds product that LinkedIn members use to advertise to other members, which puts us in the very fortunate situation of not having to rely on any third party ad sellers to sell our inventory.
Thanks again for the coverage, we’re looking forward to your coverage of our future milestones.
Cheers,
Steve Patrizi
VP, Advertising Sales & Operations
LinkedIn Corporation
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepatrizi
@spatrizi
The article also helps nudge some thinking around people and groups use of multiple social networks. Specifically, I use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in a more or less interconnected way. LinkedIn serves of course as a business networking "marketplace" and it's tools have evolved to allow me and many others to facilitate our immediate and specific needs. Many of the same people I've come to know well on LinkedIn end up as Facebook contacts who we begin to share more personal parts of our lives in family and "after work" thoughts and insights. This Facebook relationship can drive a closer connection with the business dealings on LinkedIn. Twitter in it's way helps me facilitate conversations with people on an immediate way who we may not want to form deeper relationships with but nonetheless in a memorable way.
Langston Richardson/ VP, Digital Strategy / Lazbro / www.lazbro.com / twitter: @MATSNL65 @lazbro
The problem with LinkedIn is the lack of interactivity and the cumbersome profile page. The 50 million may be a dense target for advertisers, but for users it is equally dense - but not in a good way. The discussion questions posted are often ads and the responses languish at zero. When you receive the email with the list of "questions" and no responses to any of them, it's like you've being invited to question why you've sign up for any of the groups. There may be 50 million on LinkedIn but the site is set up like a bad networking meeting. Take a lesson from Match.com, Mashable, even Facebook or Twitter. Get some value in there by way of interactivity - right now it's a place to register, not a place to relate.
I agree. LinkedIn is not user friendly. It its format worked like Facebook, it would be much better for those who want to use it.