LinkedIn cheers Wall Street with revenue and member growth
- Summary:
- Revenues are up and so are member numbers, so even increased losses are forgiven by Wall Street investors.
Closing off a week of mixed fortunes for social networking firms, LinkedIn reported more than 40% growth in its three businesses — corporate recruitment services, premium subscriptions and advertising.
- Talent Solutions, the core recruitment business grew 45% to $345 million and makes up 61% of total business.
- Marketing Solutions advertising business 45% to $109 million.
- Premium Subscriptions grew 43% year-on-year to $114 million.
Membership hit 332 million by the end of September, up from 313 million in the previous quarter, while overall revenues wereup 45% to $568 million from $393 million year-on-year.
On a less upbeat note, the third quarter loss was $4.3 million, against a $3.4 million loss in the same quarter a year earlier.
CEO Jeff Weiner is keen to emphasise that even though Premium Subscriptions are on the rise:
the vast majority of activity on LinkedIn is free and will continue to be.
In May, we began to add hundreds of thousands of open job listings from US companies to the platform targeted to active jobseekers. Last month, we extended this effort to include jobs from around the world.
We are now approaching 2 million listings, a first step in achieving our goal to have every available job in the world on LinkedIn.
In Q3, we also saw strong momentum for our Jobs mobile app. Members using LinkedIn Jobs are viewing four times as many open positions compared with other mobile-engaged members and they are applying to twice as many jobs.
Mobile is a big success point, he adds:
Mobile also continues to drive an increasing amount of value we bring to members. Unique visiting members coming from mobile devices grew nearly three times faster than overall uniques. Mobile now accounts for 47% of total traffic to LinkedIn.
What is still evolving is the balance between single-purpose apps use versys multi-purpose and this is linked it seems to the mobile uptake:
It’s really a byproduct of the way in which members, and not just members of LinkedIn, but consumers are utilizing apps on their phone, there’s less real estate, less time. They want to solve for their objectives as quickly as possible. They want to complete those tasks as quickly as possible.
The clearer you can be in terms of context, the more intuitive those applications can operate, the more value you can add to that end user, in our case, our members. The Jobseeker app would be a great example of that. Connected is another great example. That functionality is resident within flagship linkedin.com on the desktop, but it’s comingled with the number of other used cases.
On a mobile device, you can see very quickly the people in your network and what they are up to, work anniversaries, promotions, mentioned in the news through our Newsle acquisition.
Going forward, there’s a big push to get a clear understanding of LinkedIn user’s intentions in advance in order to meet their needs. Weiner sees a number of ways of doing this:
One of which is inferring that from their profile information who they are connected to, what they are following. But I think we can also just explicitly do a better job of asking what members are trying to accomplish. In doing so, I think we are going to be able to drive a better experience and subsequently higher engagement.
Then again through this multi-app portfolio strategy, we can see what members are actually doing, what applications they are activating, how they are using those applications. And I think that’s also going to enable us to get a better understanding of what they are trying to accomplish.
My take
Twitter and Facebook delivered their results and their share prices tumbled, whereas after an initial stumble, LinkedIn’s rose. Enough said.