It would be fair to say that most social networks are making hard work of generating revenue from ad networks. The likes of FaceBook and MySpace have been trying hard to pull in some serious cash from advertising - to no avail.  Considering these two social media monsters are having a hard time you’d think that other companies wouldn’t even bother going down the advertising path until a fix had been found. Think again…

LinkedIn thinks they’ve cracked it. Most social networks are hard pressed to sell ads for more $1 CPM (hint; now might be a good time to advertise on FaceBook etc) but LinkedIn have pitched in with ads starting at $30 CPM rising to $76 CPM (text ads from $12 to $20 CPM).

How do they do it? They’ve entered into a deal with Collective Media whereby select sites can target LinkedIn users when they visit a partner site. When a user visits LinkedIn a cookie is placed in the users browser. This will be used to identify them as a LinkedIn member when they visit a partner site. Personal information will be removed, but members will be grouped into different, targetable categories - laser focused advertising delivered to users. The system does allow users to opt out of the program.

Nothing new, you might think until you consider the membership of LinkedIn. Typically, most users of LinkedIn are there to use the business networking aspects of the site, with many being in senior, decision making positions.

Is this really the future of socia networks?

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