LinkedIN by Numbers

The professional version of facebook has now als reached the 100 million user mark and is still growing. LinkedIN the social networking platform for the professional world has published at the beginning of March 2011 their growth in numbers to make a good impression. Founded in 2003 in Santa Monica, California by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant, the platform has grown to be worth almost $ 3 billion and makes a revenue of over $ 160 million, this is up over 200% from the previous year 2009 at just over $ 80 million.

It was a niche market back the and probably still is. But once your big things settle and a niche can be good business. The main asset linkedIN really has is the content. All these details of businesses, jobs and positions as well as the real people behind it. They say that 73 of the Forbes 100 best companies are using linkedIN hiring systems. This means that the platform hosts a massive amount of details and hors unimaginable stock of knowledge on the worlds markets. These days knowing about the business connections is worth more than actually making business.

Regarding the numbers, there is one more number of the financial sector that is probably interesting. LinkedIN earns about $160 million, but its expenses are almost $150 million. It's actually expensive to know all these details. Presumably most of the cost goes into infrastructure.

In terms of the demographics, LinkedIN hosts over 58% male profiles and only about 42% female profiles. The main user group is between 25 and 50 years old, but the group of 18-25 year olds are also quite keen on the service with over 20%.

In terms of geographical distribution, as you would expect North America is LinkedIN homeland. with about 48% of all the users. The classic blindspots on the map are Africa, South America (except Brasil and Argentina), the Middle East and the Far East (except India). In terms of geographical gender distribution North America is doing better in terms of equality than every body else with 45% f and 55% m, where the Middle East with 23% f and 77% m is the most unbalanced market. However this is presumably not taking the numbers of users into account.

Through out the network the larger companies, over 1000 employees, are the most common. Also Smaller businesses tend to like the service, where medium sized businesses seem to be not that interested. As you would expect the leading branches are hightech 16% and finances 13% with agriculture covering the end with only about 0.4%. In terms of the job function academics are floating towards the top with around 10%, only the sales department is larger with 13%.

Interesting are aso the facts around the use and growth numbers. In terms of time of the day apparently there is a very high after lunch peak over all. During lunch and after lunch really seems to be the time web users find time for the sneaky break to check their social networking status, read a few blos and apply for a better job on inked in. The graph below also incudes the mobile user times and interestingly they mainly access the service after work and in the evening. However I imagine the graph to be slightly out of scale, the mobile users would be a lot smaller in numbers than the actual web users, but never mind. So if you really want this job you better apply before lunch.


Image taken from mashable.com / The linkedIN network by numbers compiled by xxxxx on 2011-03-22.

Via zioigor