• by Diane Mermigas , September 15, 2008

LinkedIn is launching a vertical network today that will extend the reach of advertisers buying its targeted professional user base to related special-interest publishers through an alliance with online ad network Collective Media.

"This arrangement will allow us to deliver our ads across a much broader base," says Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn's director of advertising sales. No initial participating publishers are being identified.

The formation of the LinkedIn Audience Network is part of LinkedIn's overall push to more fully monetize its business professional social network--one of the few on the Web that is profitable--as well as to consistently charge premium CPMS of $75-plus. The objective is to grow more lucrative B-to-B targeting and relevance, away from the Web's rush of commoditized advertising. That could include anything from small business executives to CEOs, with collectible automobiles across its 24-million-member base, of which nearly half is outside the U.S.

LinkedIn executives decline to qualify the precise revenue split involved--although the ad network arrangement is expected to immediately boost ad dollars, which comprise one-fourth of its overall annual revenues of $100 million. (The remainder is generated from premium subscriptions, classifieds and corporate solutions.) This also marks the move of one significant social network to become its own ad network.

Although hundreds of top-tier advertisers run campaigns on LinkedIn.com to deliver targeted marketing based on information that members publicly share in their LinkedIn profiles, the new network will help advertisers to better capitalize on pre-defined, scalable audience segments such as corporate executives, small businesses and IT professionals. The non-personally identifiable data available to advertisers includes job function, seniority, company size, gender and geography.

Among other things, LinkedIn is expected to more fully enter video-sharing among its members, which they have begun to see through new content partnerships with BusinessWeek and CNBC.

The Collective Network links high-quality, brand-name publishers with Fortune 1000 brand and direct advertisers. Collective Media's AMP offers high-end publishers an ad network management platform to create their own branded, vertical ad networks. LinkedIn has more than tripled its page views in the past year, placing it fourth behind Facebook, MySpace and Classmates by skillfully capitalizing on a delicate three-way business social model that no one else has been able to emulate.

LinkedIn will roll out foreign-language versions and expand into other international markets later this year. A string of new mobile applications are also being designed for the business crowd.