Tim Gregory » Social network

LinkedIn profitable, Facebook not so much

Tim — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:26:51 +0000

Spotted two interesting links today.

In the first, The Guardian says that Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.

The premise is that in spite of having a massive userbase, one that is now larger than the population of the USA, Facebook is struggling to extract financial value from their audience.

The second link is a Silicon Valley Insider interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in which he claims that LinkedIn is still profitable with ad revenues up 50%.

LinkedIn has 3 main revenue streams, with online advertising being only one of them.

Weiner doesn’t give any breakdown, but implies that a significant portion of LinkedIn revenues are generated by their premium subscription business and corporate recruitment solutions.

I blogged this week with a throw-away thought that LinkedIn could possibly be built today as a Facebook application, but now I’m not so sure… it’s clear that LinkedIn have managed to build a profitable business quite different to the type of business that could be created inside Facebook’s ecosystem.

What do you think? Will Facebook become super-profitable?

What if LinkedIn was a Facebook app?

Tim — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:00:26 +0000

Facebook has seen extraordinary growth in the last year, and now boasts over 350 million users, with 50% of their active users logging in every day.

It’s clear that their platform strategy is paying off, with more than 350,000 active applications deployed on the Facebook platform, and more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications implementing Facebook Connect in the past year.

Some applications have managed to build massive audiences, with Farmville clocking up 69 million+ active users, Causes attracting 34 million users, and Cafe World serving in excess of 30 million users.

After 6 years of investment and growth, LinkedIn has managed to grow to somewhere north of 50 million users.

This raises a question for me – if LinkedIn were to launch today, with the benefit of seeing how the Facebook Platform has grown to dominate the social networking space, would they create a new service, or would LinkedIn be a business networking and recruitment app built on top of the Facebook platform?

I’d love to hear your thoughts – drop me a comment below…

Farmville vs. Twitter

Tim — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:35:43 +0000

Being a bit of a Twitter skeptic in spite of trying to use it daily for a while, I enjoyed seeing this post on Mashable showing that Farmville is bigger than Twitter.

I find it really funny that a fairly pointless farm simulation game has had much more rapid growth than the service that the founders thought would grow to 1 billion users and become the pulse of the planet.

They went as far as asking whether they were “building a new internet”.
I don’t think anyone playing Farmville thinks they are building a new agricultural industry.