Learnings from Earnings: LinkedIn’s Q1 Reporting
May 3rd, 2013 | by Jason Alba |Check out this post: LinkedIn Stock Dips 10% On Slowing Growth, Even As It Beats Q1 Estimates On Sales of $324.7M; EPS $0.45
I don’t like the stock market. I don’t think it provides real feedback on how a company really does, so the 10% dip doesn’t concern me at all.
Having said that, here is what I got from that post:
- LinkedIn soared past the 200M mark and now has over 225M members. This DOES NOT mean users, it means signups. I’m guessing a lot (most?) of the new signups are outside of the U.S.
- LinkedIn will “earn” more than $1B this year. That is really cool.
- They are excited about new features but I’m afraid this will only be a push to get more upgrade money instead of more users and usefulness.
- Premium subscriptions for the quarter was $65.6M. I could be totally wrong but I think that means they have 1.1M upgrades. Here is how I got there. I am assuming most upgrades are at the bottom end: $20/month. 65.6M divided by 3 months in the quarter = $21.9M per month. 21.9M = $20 monthly upgrade price = about 1.1M people. One flaw in this rough calculation is that don’t know if the $64.5M figure includes corporate and recruiter upgrades… regardless, 1.1M upgrades on 225M people is less than 1/2 percent, which is what I’ve always heard freemium models do.
That’s my simple takeaway from the TechCrunch post…
