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Social Networking - Wednesday, June 18, 2008

LinkedIn's $1B Valuation Spot On

Visiting LinkedIn this week, a Microsoft video ad took over our screen targeting small business people.. We can only imagine the exorbitant CPM that Redmond paid for that ad. But where else can one reach millions of businesspeople in the act of doing their job? LinkedIn is a marketers and recruiters dream. And no other online business network can lay a finger on LinkedIn. Sure it has some annoying quirks and has not innovated as quickly as possible but it is dependable and growing like a weed.

Today LinkedIn announced that is is raising $53M at a $1B valuation. Investors are Bain Capital, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Let's compare the valuation to others:

+ Facebook at $15B. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook has yet to nail its revenue model. Facebook will have just ad revenues whereas LinkedIn also has paid recruiting and premium membership models.

+ Ning and Slide valued at $500 to $560. Great traffic and growht for these sites but again the business models are shaky.

LinkedIn says that it has 23M members with about 1.2M new members per month.

Founder Reid Hoffman on CNBC recently
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