X owner Elon Musk’s ongoing battle with advertisers seems to be opening up the floor for other social sites to thrive. LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network for job hunting and other professional endeavors, in 2023 saw a 10 percent bump in ad revenue to $4 billion, according to data from Insider Intelligence. Some analyses attribute LinkedIn’s ad revenue growth to X’s decline, but the connection isn’t yet clear, said Jeremy Goldman, an analyst with Insider Intelligence.
Despite X’s recent advertisers exodus, ad spending on the platform hasn’t dropped off in a remarkable way. “There are a lot of existing advertisers that are still spending on X,” Goldman told Observer. Insider Intelligence predicts ad spending on X in 2024 will be only 4.3 percent less than in 2023, a much smaller decline than last year. Meanwhile, ad spending on LinkedIn is expected to grow 15 percent to $4.6 billion this year, according to Insider Intelligence’s prediction.
LinkedIn may be an attractive platform for advertisers because of its professional and corporate overtones. Penry Pricy, LinkedIn’s head of marketing solutions, told the Financial Times recently that brands felt that they could use LinkedIn for a specific type of marketing compared to other platforms, because of its data around users’ job history and work-related interests. The Financial Times also obtained a pitch deck from LinkedIn to advertisers that said they could “work with a partner who respects the world you operate in.”
While the ad revenue growth is a positive sign for LinkedIn, the strides are small in comparison to its bigger rivals, Insider Intelligence data show. LinkedIn makes up for only 1.5 percent of digital ad spending in the U.S., compared to Facebook’s 21 percent and Google’s 27 percent, according to Insider Intelligence data.
“Is LinkedIn doing well? Yes. Are we seeing a crazy year-over-year increase? I wouldn’t say crazy,” Goldman said. “It’s noticeable, but also it will be slowing down over time.”
Advertisers are seeing a decent return on investment from their campaigns on LinkedIn, but the platform runs fewer campaigns and its user base is more stagnant than peer social sites, Goldman said, so LinkedIn has to prioritize user engagement, such as time spent on the site, which allows the company to be less reliant on advertising than competitors.
“That’s actually helpful because that puts less pressure on [LinkedIn] to run as many ads as possible,” Goldman said. “And they’re incentivized to [focus on] user experience, simply because they don’t have as many users to lose.”
Musk has previously discussed his plans to make X an “everything app,” which would include a feature called X Hiring to rival LinkedIn. At a company meeting in October 2023, he said that he’d already started introducing recruiting features to X and that he’d personally used X to recruit. CEO Yaccarino agreed that “LinkedIn is overdue for some competition.”