Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
LinkedIn (LNKD) has had a rough time of it until the past few days as it has been thrown into the Facebook (FB) boat. Until Facebook lifted Friday, LinkedIn was stuck in purgatory despite one of the best earning report’s of any public company in the U.S. last quarter, and a quite different business model. Sometimes you really wonder what these Wall Street geniuses are thinking in their simplistic relationships between stocks. “One is social network and was an overinflated valuation at IPO hence the other must be…”
Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky has a very in depth interview with CEO Jeff Weiner. For those interested in the stock, or even users – it’s quite an interesting read. A few snippets below:
ADAM LASHINSKY: Let’s stick on the current state of play for a moment. You’ve got three primary revenue streams. Would you just tick through them and explain them briefly?
JEFF WEINER: Sure. So, Hiring Solutions.
ADAM LASHINSKY: Hiring Solutions is?
JEFF WEINER: The largest and fastest growing that enables recruiters to come on LinkedIn and find the ideal candidate, and conversely it enables jobseekers to find their dream jobs.
ADAM LASHINSKY: And they’ll pay — and particularly recruiters will pay money, because they’re going to get — they get a higher level of service as recruiters than an individual who just puts a profile up on LinkedIn?
JEFF WEINER: Yeah, recruiters are paying for unlimited access to the entire repository. They’re paying for access to tools that you can’t otherwise get in the free ecosystem. An example of that would be what we call Recruiter, which is our flagship recruiting product, and that enables recruiters to do unlimited searches, share the results. We’ve now added an additional service to that called Talent Pipeline, which enables recruiters to manage the pipeline of prospects that they’re finding either on LinkedIn or off LinkedIn, job posts, a social layer on those job posts, so people can see who they know within a company that they’re applying to up to 3 degrees to get their foot in the door. We enable recruiters who are not at larger companies with larger budgets to purchase a subscription package so when they post a job they can get recommendations, et cetera.
ADAM LASHINSKY: And then job postings are another revenue stream. That’s not just for recruiters but for companies as well?
JEFF WEINER: Well, that’s part of Hiring Solutions. So, that would all come under the Hiring Solutions umbrella.
Then we have Marketing Solutions or ad sales. And our primary focus there is business-to-business, so enabling companies that want to reach out and target professionals. Our professional audience by composition is one of the most affluent, most influential and best educated on the consumer web. And so it’s a really effective way for a company to reach out and target potential prospects, target potential employees.
And we’re having a lot of success with our new Company Follower model. We have over 2 million active company profiles on LinkedIn, which a lot of people don’t realize. Companies like IBM have over half a million followers already, and now they can target those followers with specific messages, introductions of new products, whitepapers with knowledge and expertise, and they can build a rapport with these highly valuable individual professionals.
ADAM LASHINSKY: Tell me about outside the United States. Where are you and where aren’t you?
JEFF WEINER: So, we’re in 25 cities around the world now.
ADAM LASHINSKY: Twenty-five cities.
JEFF WEINER: Twenty-five cities around the world in terms of local presence. We’re in 17 languages where the site’s been fully translated. We have major operational hubs in all major regions of the world: Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America. And with regard to our overall composition, our membership is about 61 percent internationally comprised, and revenue is about 36 percent.
Our revenue, the percentage of our revenue that’s internationally comprised has been steadily growing as we’ve continued to invest more in our local sales and local marketing efforts, but ultimately the goal is to continue to close the gap between the 36 percent of revenue that comes internationally and the 61 percent of members that come internationally. And we’re going to continue to be able to do that by building out our presence in these local markets, and continue to invest in developing markets, developing countries.
ADAM LASHINSKY: What are a handful of countries that are star countries for LinkedIn, both from a membership and from a revenue perspective, outside the U.S.?
JEFF WEINER: Yeah, from revenue and member perspective certainly Europe is our largest region outside the United States from a monetization perspective. The UK is a big country for us. The Netherlands is the most engaged LinkedIn country in the world.
Brazil is another standout, both in terms of membership — it’s now one of the fastest growing in absolute membership anywhere in the world. We just opened up a new office in Sao Paolo. We’re very excited about what we’re seeing there and the demand for our products.
ADAM LASHINSKY: And how is East Asia and Southeast Asia?
JEFF WEINER: Yeah, so we have an operational headquarters in Singapore that we recently opened, a lot of momentum there. Australia has been a real highlight for us in terms of monetization. Southeast Asia is starting to come on strong, still very early days there.
Disclosure Notice
Any securities mentioned on this page are not held by the author in his personal portfolio. Securities mentioned may or may not be held by the author in the mutual fund he manages, the Paladin Long Short Fund (PALFX). For a list of the aforementioned fund’s holdings at the end of the prior quarter, visit the Paladin Funds website at http://www.paladinfunds.com/holdings/blog
