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Content Tagged xing
Is LinkedIn Worth $1 Billion?
The big news tonight is business social network LinkedIn raised $53 million in Series D funding at a valuation of $1 billion. The new round is led by Bain Capital (the same genius investors who also funded Vonage) brings the total money raised by the company to about $80 million. I wasn’t going to write about this, given everyone had already jumped on the story.
Anyway the valuation of $1 billion -not as insane as the valuation placed by Microsoft on Facebook - was jaw dropping. Sure, LinkedIn has more value than plain vanilla me-too social networks but is it really worth a billion dollars? I ended up doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations while watching Boston Celtics celebrate their 17th NBA Championships.
The question of over-valuation had first popped up when I read about this round in May 2008 on Venturebeat . Techcrunch then reported that Allen & Co, the New York bank was helping Reid Hoffman’s company raise fresh capital at the $1 billion valuation.
So I decided to do a back-of-the-envelope comparison with XING with some of the publicly available data on XING, a European Social Network that is publicly traded in Frankfurt. It is a pretty good proxy for a business-focused social network, such as LinkedIn.
It has a market capitalization of about $300 million. It has has 5.71 million subscribers. XING had revenues of around $11.6 million at the end of first quarter 2008; about 70 cents per month per subscriber. That works out to about $52.30 per subscriber. For sake of comparison, Facebook’s reported $15 billion valuation works out to $125 per subscriber.
If you use those numbers, then LinkedIn’s rumored 20 million users are worth $1.04 billion. The company is adding about 1.3 million new subscribers a month, so by those estimates it should end the year at around 29 million subscribers. USA Today reported that LinkedIn was on target to do between $75-to-$100 million in revenues this year. Lets be generous and assume that they indeed do $100 million that works out to about 29 cents per month per subscriber (assuming that the number of subscribers at the end of the year is about 29 million.)
My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if your user the value per subscriber of then LinkedIn’s $1 billion got a market valuation. On per-subscriber revenue basis, LinkedIn seems a tad overvalued, especially considering that their traffic is range bound, and the number of active uniques is showing a slight slump.
What do you guys think?
Update: Connie Loizos of PE Hub is spot on in saying that this video of LinkedIn VCs self-congratulating themselves made her cringe. Me to Connie.
Xing Acquires Turkish Networking Site Cember.net
Xing has acquired leading Turkish business networking site Cember.net.
Cember.net is said to be the biggest business networking site in Turkey with over 280,000 members. The site is ranked at 117 in Turkey according to Alexa.
Xing said it would use the acquisition to strength its penetration into Turkey, “one of Europe’s fastest growing economies.” Çağlar Erol and Nihan Colak Erol, the founders of Cember.net, will stay on with Xing to support the Turkish-speaking Xing community with a small team based in Istanbul.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
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Plaxo’s For Sale
Plaxo, the Sequoia-backed start that transformed itself from a hated spam monster into a mild mannered and interesting business social network, has started a sale process according to a source. They’ve hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort.
We do not know what price Plaxo is looking for. The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four rounds, including $9 million last February. The company had over 15 million users as of September 2006, and their recent integration into Google Open Social has led to a further growth spike.
There were rumors in mid 2007 that Plaxo was being acquired by European competitor Xing. Those rumors were either inaccurate or the deal was never completed.
I have an email in to Plaxo CEO Ben Golub for comment. If I were him, I wouldn’t respond.
Update: User data from John McCrea, VP Marketing at Plaxo:
For our networked address book service, we’re right around 20 million users, plus another 15 million address book accounts hosted through partnerships.
Increasingly, though, we are focused on Pulse as the key driver of active users (and pageviews), and although we are still in beta (and haven’t yet broadly promoted to the address book user base), we’re seeing good month-over-month growth in all the key indicators. With Pulse, we’re at 1 million unique monthly users, up from 250K at the beginning of November. In terms of page views and time spent on the
site, our per-visit numbers appear to be comparable to Facebook (based on data from Compete.com), even though our demographic is much more like LinkedIn’s (professional, 25-50 y/o).
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Xing: Vollautomatischer Bewegungsmelder " Sprechblase
What Is Your Social Network Really Worth?
Now we all know that Facebook is worth one gazillion dollars, but how about the people who are always social networking? In other words, how much is your personal network worth? Germany-based Xing has come up with a tool called MyNetworkValue that lets you put a dollar value on your network. My network value was pretty high, though not as high as Robert Scoble, who must be a gazillionaire based on his Facebook network alone.
A day before Thanksgiving, this is a great time waster.
Xing May Be In Talks To Acquire Plaxo
We are hearing a LOT of chatter about a possible Xing-Plaxo merger in the $250 million range. The deal makes some sense - newly public Xing is headquartered in Germany and hasn’t gotten much traction in the U.S. where it competes directly with LinkedIn. Plaxo, with a very strong U.S. presence, could give them the opportunity they need to attack this market.
But people who would be very likely to have knowledge of the deal are saying they’ve heard absolutely nothing. One thing we are hearing from everyone, though: Plaxo is definitely in play. The company’s fair valuation is another matter. Last year they crossed 10 million members, claimed they were getting 50,000 new members per day, and had just become profitable. But it has been more than a year since Plaxo released those stats.
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Playing with the Xing API
Xing is Europe's leading Business Network with more than 2 million members. Recently, Xing announced that they would come up with an API later this year to get access to the network. As far as I know, Xing was developed by ePublica using Perl and MySQL.
Having an API is essential in these mashup days. I was invited to the private alpha test and implemented a reference implementation of an API client via PHP5 which behaves like SOAPClient (but uses ReST as the transport mechanism) and overloads the methods that are available.
Here's an example of how to call it currently (API is subject to change as it is in an alpha state):
$client = new XingClient(XING_DEVELOPERKEY, XING_OWNUSER);
// find my contacts and return some object properties
$result = $client->userContacts(array('id' => XING_OWNUSER,
'attributes' => 'display_name,company_name,current_company,business_address,photo_urls'));
Currently, for security and data privacy reasons (I have to say that Xing has always been an example of how to protect their user's data/privacy), the API lets me only access my direct business contacts and furthermore scrambles the personal data of the contacts.
In the last few days I had a bit time during a cold and wrote my own mashup - marking my Xing contacts on a Google Map. Click on continue to see some screenshots and a bit of explanation ...
Continue reading "Playing with the Xing API"
Playing with the Xing API
Xing is Europe's leading Business Network with more than 2 million members. Recently, Xing announced that they would come up with an API later this year to get access to the network. As far as I know, Xing was developed by ePublica using Perl and MySQL.
Having an API is essential in these mashup days. I was invited to the private alpha test and implemented a reference implementation of an API client via PHP5 which behaves like SOAPClient (but uses ReST as the transport mechanism) and overloads the methods that are available.
Here's an example of how to call it currently (API is subject to change as it is in an alpha state):
$client = new XingClient(XING_DEVELOPERKEY, XING_OWNUSER);
// find my contacts and return some object properties
$result = $client->userContacts(array('id' => XING_OWNUSER,
'attributes' => 'display_name,company_name,current_company,business_address,photo_urls'));
Currently, for security and data privacy reasons (I have to say that Xing has always been an example of how to protect their user's data/privacy), the API lets me only access my direct business contacts and furthermore scrambles the personal data of the contacts.
In the last few days I had a bit time during a cold and wrote my own mashup - marking my Xing contacts on a Google Map. Click on continue to see some screenshots and a bit of explanation ...
Continue reading "Playing with the Xing API"
