Networking is about providing real value to users

From the Linkedin perspective, what are your India

plans?



We are seeing tremendous growth in this market. India is the fastest growing

market in the world. As a company, we are growing at 180% y-o-y, and so we are

here to understand what our users are doing; to understand how we can serve

advertisers and corporates better. We are bullish about the Indian market, and

we have made huge investments here.

In recent times, theres an emerging trend of

networking portal business. Do you think its more of a rat race?



I dont think that is the case here. Linkedin started in 2003, and at that

time there were a lot of other companies in both social and professional

networking space. Many of them havent been that much successful, and so

networking is not just about sayingI have a networking site, and so come and

join it. It is about how you provide real value and understanding that will

bring users to the site. Providing real value sounds easier than doing it in

real.

Which are the revenue streams for Linkedin?



We have diverse revenue streams, right now. These include advertising,

subscriptions of software solutions where we sell special solutions to

corporates as SaaS packages to enable them post job vacancies and source fairly

high-end candidates. Diversity of business revenues is very important when you

consider an Internet company. Most of the Internet companies have advertising as

the only means of revenues and when you get your growth in markets other than

the US or Western Europe, then you run into trouble because your cost structure

doesnt change; in fact it goes off.

What are your views about social networking sites and

their localization as per the users culture and geographies?



Definitely, understanding the needs and what the local market wants is very

important for anyone to be successful. And more importantly, I believe in

building features for them, understanding what they want and how I can make them

frictionless for them. The good and the bad news about online businesses is that

users can come easily to you, but they can leave you even faster! So unless you

dont have real value, you will not be able to keep the users for a long time.

What will be the next big thing for networking portals?



One of the things in social networking portals is that you find the

explosion of data because people are constantly doing something or the other on

the network. So social networks can make use of that data in order to provide

additional value to users, and secondly make that data available to users so

that they become smarter too.

Pankaj Maru/CMN



maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in