LinkedIn reported its first earning since going public in May. The company reported a $4.5M profit for the second quarter (2c a share) on $121M revenue, a 50% increase over last year.
Don’t get too excited on the earning side, at least in the short term, the company declared that they were willing to sacrifice short term earnings to invest in new technology and product development.
On the user side, LinkedIn announced 116M users, a 61% increase over the same time last year.
The user numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Over the last year, we have seen spammers creating massive numbers of fake profiles to spam discussion groups and infiltrate personal networks.
LinkedIn has been notorious for their lack of action against spam and spammers, one might argue, to ring up higher number of “users”, it will be interesting to see if they will change course in the future and tackle that growing issue before it has an impact on their real base.
Let’s hope for us users that some of the investment in technology and new product will address that growing problem.