Social media platform, LinkedIn has now surpassed $2 billion in premium subscription revenue in the last 12 months. Parent company Microsoft said the platform where people look for and talk about work saw its revenue grow by 9 per cent over the same period.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella confirmed that the figures revealed how much the platform has grown since its acquisition in 2016. LinkedIn now has more than 1 billion users, both premium and free.
The platform’s $2 billion revenue is a major milestone. It shows that the company has been recording a growing number of extra features in the paid tiers to persuade more users to sign on and pay up. The overall revenue grew by around 50 per cent in the last two years.
Reacting to the growth, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky noted that building a $2B revenue subscription business is something only a handful of digitally native companies have ever accomplished.
“We’re focused on designing and continuing to iterate on a model that is value-orientated to meet the needs of our subscribers — those who want to accelerate their career or grow their business. We bet big on our investment in AI tools to help our subscribers accelerate how they connect to opportunity, and it’s paying off,” he added.
However, LinkedIn did not disclose how much it has made in total revenue in those 12 months nor what other business divisions of LinkedIn are generating. However, it was estimated that in 2024 the platform recorded a revenue of about $16.2 billion where premium subscriptions represent 12.5 per cent of the revenue.
The development adds to the $1.7 billion premium subscription revenue it disclosed in March 2024 for 12 months. LinkedIn has been fairly selective about what it discloses about its financial and user figures since its acquisition 11 years ago after choosing to focus on the good news to offset less strong numbers.
As the premium subscription figure covers both Careers and Business tiers, the social media platform said that the new AI features that it has been launching have seen strong take-up with premium subscribers, where about 40 per cent of them are using the features. The AI feature includes AI-powered job-hunting tools and tools to help with professional development.
On future projections, the company expects its revenue to grow in the “low- to mid-single digits” dragged by headwinds in the Talent Solutions division.
Aside from LinkedIn, more figures from Microsoft
The $2 billion LinkedIn revenue figure comes as Microsoft reported Q2 earnings on Wednesday. The report indicated growth slowed in its cloud business which has sent the company’s shares down in aftermarket trading.
Meanwhile, the tech giant announced that its revenue increased by 12 per cent to $69.6 billion, and net income of $24.1 billion to a 10 per cent rise. “We are innovating across our tech stack and helping customers unlock the full ROI of AI to capture the massive opportunity ahead,” said Nadella.
Microsoft’s newer lines of business, specifically AI, are growing faster with $13 billion in annual revenue, representing a 175 per cent surge on last year. “We remain committed to balancing operational discipline with continued investments in our cloud and AI infrastructure,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.
Talk of AI, the recent popularity of Chinese AI DeepSeek has sent shocking waves across the tech industry. The AI became the talk of the tech world when it released its R1 model on Friday. R1’s functionality and accuracy compared to its U.S. counterparts seems like a win for the overall AI industry, despite using fewer resources and less computing power.
The AI competition intensified as Microsoft opened an investigation into the possibility of DeepSeek using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) for its model development. Microsoft, a big investor in OpenAI, had earlier notified the ChatGPT owner of the suspected activity.
Trump’s AI and crypto “czar”, David Sacks also expressed that there’s “substantial evidence” that Chinese AI company DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models where he tagged the process as theft.
Experts have thereby suggested that the core issue seems to come from distillation, a method used by AI model developers to extract knowledge from another model using a teacher-student sort of behaviour.
Read More: Microsoft to investigate DeepSeek over possibility of using OpenAI’s model.
Technext Newsletter
Get the best of Africa’s daily tech to your inbox – first thing every morning.
Join the community now!
