LinkedIn Revenues Cause for Others to take Notice
LinkedIn for many started as what one would call a neat BtoB social networking tool that filled the void of an interesting novelty, but for many that novelty wore off quickly and early adopters were left wondering what use LinkedIn served. With a sense of bewilderment, user energies shifted to things such as Facebook or Bebo – business models that kept up their momentum. Well… LinkedIn fooled us all as they made a shift in focus in 2007 and worked hard to position the product in ways so that it’s leadership could better maximize the sites earning potential. The results today show that the initiatives taken on by Dan Nye (CEO) and team allowed LinkedIn to take its revenues from 10 million (2006) to close to 100 million today. In addition to revenue growths, the site has seen its membership increase from 8 million to 30 million.
On face value, many publishers may dismiss LinkedIn as a viable competitor, but their continued roll out of enhanced tools for advertisers and recruiters, proves otherwise. Among LinkedIn’s list of publisher and traditional publisher audience activity are; its relationship with the New York Times, the LinkedIn Audience Network, the LinkedIn Job Insider Tool, and notably in March of this year, LinkedIn opened up its member database to recruiters, for a fee of course.
It is this list of actions among others that have made many publishing industry pundits stand up and take notice of LinkedIn’s strategy and potential plans. With what I have seen of LinkedIn to date, I suspect they will be looking to build more relationships with traditional publishers, similar to their deal with the New York Times. Although the relationship doesn’t seem to be a huge revenue generator, it definitely is a way for them to build critical mass. As per revenue, they may open up their Ad Networks to traditional publishers, while sweetening the deal to get them to “mult” their larger national advertiser on to LinkedIn – similar in ways to what Google has tried to do with their AdWords program. Either way and whatever the direction, I suspect when publishers have conversations about Google and Yahoo!, it will be necessary for them to included LinkedIn in that picture to gain an accurate understanding of the marketplace.
