LinkedIn: Hate To Say I Told You So
A very short post today. LinkedIn, the social network for business people, have announced a new round of funding that values the company at $1 billion. According to The Guardian:
LinkedIn is … understood to have received takeover interest, but decided instead to retain its independence. Chief executive Dan Nye said yesterday that his hope is that the company will, “at some point” seek a flotation .
Unlike some other dotcom businesses which have received eye-watering valuations, LinkedIn actually makes a profit, by selling adverts on its site and charging users for some extra features.
Many people may think that this is still a very high valuation for a site with revenues of around $100 million and as I’m not a financial analyst, I can’t really comment. What I will say is that this is something we predicted last year, and shows that social networks can be successful businesses, when they have well thought out business models and provide real value to the user (kind of obvious really, isn’t it?)
