LinkedIn prepping for monetization with dynamically targeted DirectAds

Written on June 30, 2008 – 10:49 am
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

I’ve been a long-time registered user of LinkedIn, the social network centered around your career and professional relationships, and apart from a number of frustrations (e.g. the terrible ‘Groups’ feature execution) I consider the service to be outstanding in a lot of ways.

Just having been valued over $1 billion after raising $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures, the business social network has a lot going for it. It boasts 23 million members worldwide, it’s profitable, and both revenues and user base growth figures show absolutely no sign of slowing down. But will that revenue growth continue to come only from charging for premium services and contextual advertising?

Blogger robwebb2k was the first to spot and report on a beta experiment LinkedIn is currently running, dubbed DirectAds, a dynamic CPM text advertising platform currently being soft-launched with no offical word from the company just yet.

What we can gather from the information available on the website, advertisers will be able to dynamically target ads by age, gender, geography, educational institution, industry, and seniority. Minimum order size for an advertisement is $25, with the minimum number of impressions dependant on the targeting audience chosen by the advertiser, who will conveniently be identifiable through its own LinkedIn presence. This also means the advertiser has to have a profile on the website, and LinkedIn says they are limiting advertisers by completeness of profile, number of connections, date of profile creation and a number of other factors. As Nick O’Neill at The Social Times points out, the service is reminiscent of Facebook’s Social Ads and is currently restricted to the United States.

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directads, facebook, linkedin, linkedin directads, monetization, social ads, social networks

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

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4 comments/trackbacks to “LinkedIn prepping for monetization with dynamically targeted DirectAds”

Jun 30, 2008: LinkedIn DirectAds: gericht adverteren met een kleiner budget | HRlog.nl
[...] dank aan The Next Web Tags: adverteren, directads, doelgroep, doelgroepgericht adverteren, LinkedIn You can follow [...]
Jun 30, 2008: LinkedIn se prepara para la motetización con DirectAds
[...] sus perfiles profesionales y establecen contactos en ese sentido, está probando DirectAds, una plataforma de anuncios dinámicos de texto CPM, aunque la compañía no ha declarado nada por el [...]
Jul 16, 2008: Linkedin introduces targeted advertising
[...] advertisements on age, gender, industry, or seniority of ad viewers. Two weeks ago co-editor Robin reported the soft-launch, now it’s for [...]

By Patrick de Laive on Jun 30, 2008

Interesting development. This is of course an obvious way of making money with a social network. I think we’ll see more and more networks with similar platforms in the near future.

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