• GigaOm, Wednesday, June 18, 2008 12 PM

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, announced a new $53 million round of Series D funding on Tuesday that values the Silicon Valley startup at $1 billion. While nowhere near the jaw-dropping $15 billion valuation Microsoft placed on Facebook when it acquired a 1% stake last year, GigaOm's Om Malik reckons the assessment is still rather bubblish.

Here's why: LinkedIn's European cousin, XING, which is publicly traded in Frankfurt, has 5.71 million subscribers and a market cap of about $300 million. This works out to $52.30 per subscriber. Facebook, at a valuation of $15 billion, works out to around $125 per subscriber. LinkedIn has 20 million users and a valuation of $1.04 billion, which works out to around $50 per user, but the startup is adding around 1.3 million new subscribers per month, which means that by the end of the year it should have 29 million subscribers.

According to USA Today, LinkedIn's target was $75-$100 million in revenues this year. If indeed revenues are on track for $100 million, then $1.04 billion doesn't sound so far-fetched. But on a per-subscriber basis, Malik says the social network seems "a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump."

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