Home AdExchanger Talks Podcast: Inside LinkedIn’s $2 Billion Ad Business

Podcast: Inside LinkedIn’s $2 Billion Ad Business

SHARE:

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

LinkedIn is on track to surpass $2 billion in ad-based revenue during its fiscal 2019 – a remarkable number, given that LinkedIn has kept paid media squarely on the back burner (a policy it shares with parent company Microsoft). Its advertising opportunity is more akin to that of Amazon than to the Google-Facebook duopoly. Which is to say: data-rich and incremental.

Today in the podcast studio, LinkedIn’s VP of marketing solutions, Penry Price, describes how their ad business didn’t really take off until the company embraced a feed-based content interface.

“This was going to be our future, or we weren’t going to have a large future in ads,” Price said of the feed launch.

Before the feed, he said, “You had a cap on revenue [because of inventory scarcity], and it wasn’t going to be a very large business even if it was successful from a yield standpoint.”

The strategy worked, and LinkedIn was able to conjure up gobs of highly visible advertising inventory. It is now looking beyond its largest accounts in tech, services and education to the mid-market. Price says the company’s largest opportunity may lie with smaller, self-serve buyers.

“There are about 70 million companies in the world,” he says. “We are dealing today with a few hundred thousand. We see massive growth opportunities in that scaled self-serve way to make sure those companies can build a digital presence, can be where professionals are, can hire more people, can sell their products and services, whatever they may want to do.”

Also in this episode: LinkedIn’s contract with its users; what happened with Bizo; the account-based marketing boom.

Must Read

Critics Say The Trade Desk Is Forcing Kokai Adoption, But Apparently It’s Up To Agencies

Is TTD forcing agencies to adopt the new Kokai interface despite claims they can still use the interface of their choice? Here’s what we were able to find out.

Why Big Brand Price Increases Will Flatten Ad Budgets

Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.

The IAB Tech Lab Isn’t Pulling Any Punches In The Fight Against AI Scraping

IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur didn’t mince his words when declaring unauthorized generative AI scraping of publisher content “theft, full stop.”

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Gamechanger (Google lost the DOJ's search antitrust case)

Here’s Who’s Testifying During The Remedy Phase Of Google’s Ad Tech Antitrust Trial

Last week, the DOJ and Google filed their respective witness lists and the exhibit lists for the remedy phase of the ad tech antitrust trial. Lots of familiar faces!

MX8 Labs Launches With A Plan To Speed Up The Survey-Based Research Biz

What’s the point of a market research survey that could take weeks, when consumer sentiment is rollercoasting up and down every day? That’s the problem MX8 Labs aims to tackle.