Could Economic Weakness Help LinkedIn in 2008?

[mandy]

Facebook’s sober cousin seems well-positioned for any economic weakness that could emerge in 2008, because it doesn’t depend primarily on advertising, but rather makes money by selling premium services to subscribers and their employers. And if people start losing their jobs, they’ll be all the more interested in LinkedIn’s services.

LinkedIn faces challenges, of course...English-only LinkedIn needs to push forward aggressively with internationalization and localization in 2008. It competes with Xing in Germany and Viadeo in France, both of which support multiple languages.

From an international perspective, Facebook doesn’t look so exciting. It competes with a vast array of social networks including hi5, Bebo, Orkut, Mixi, QQ and more. Besides that, it could have permanently offended many of its users with its ham-handed attempts at social advertising. For LinkedIn, advertising is a source of revenue secondary to providing services its users find valuable enough to pay for. On that basis alone, I hope that 2008 is the year of LinkedIn rather than Facebook...

full article: http://gigaom.com/2007/11/30/2008-the-year-of-linkedin/