• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 29, 2015

Although hardly a perfect performance, LinkedIn beat analysts’ revenue and profit expectations during the third quarter of the year.

Year-over-year, total revenue increased 37% to $780 million -- including $41 million in revenue from lynda.com -- while earnings reached 78 cents per share, the company said Thursday.
 
Specifically, revenue from LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions unit increased a healthy 46% year-over-year to $502 million.

Marketing Solutions revenue grew 28% year-over-year to $140 million, while Premium Subscriptions revenue improved 21% year-over-year to $138 million.

While Sponsored Updates performance exceeded 100% growth over the past, LinkedIn said it would have been higher were it not for “expected premium display headwinds.” 

Learning & Development contributed $41 million in revenue, in its first full quarter of contribution post acquisition, LinkedIn said Thursday.

Due to expenses associated with ongoing restructuring, however, the professional-focused social network also reported a wider loss during the quarter.

Recently, LinkedIn has added several product enhancements, including a new messaging service in place of its email inbox, and a new mobile design.

During the quarter, LinkedIn said cumulative members grew 20% to 396 million. Just last week, the network said it reached the 400 million member milestone.

During the period, unique visiting members grew 11% to an average of 100 million per month, and member page views grew 33%.

“This has yielded 20% year-over-year growth in page views per unique visiting member, continuing a pattern of accelerated growth throughout 2015, Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, said in prepared remarks on Thursday.

Also of note, mobile continues to grow at double the rate of overall member activity, and now represents 55% of all traffic to LinkedIn, Weiner noted.

This year, eMarketer expects LinkedIn to capture 1% of the $58.12 billion U.S. ad market. That's a slight increase from 0.9% in 2014. Next year, the research firm expects LinkedIn’s market share to grow to 1.1%.

LinkedIn will also see mobile ad revenue growth of 170%, this year, eMarketer expects. Higher than any other company the research firm tracks, it attributed the growth to LinkedIn’s small mobile footprint.

For its part, LinkedIn said on Thursday that it expects revenue in the fourth quarter to range between $845 million and $850 million.