It looks like all those acquisitions in the past year paid off. European professional social network Xing is reporting 5 million registered members worldwide, and significant growth in paid subscribers. The strongest growth, in fact, over the entire history of the company. With revenues reaching $28.74 million for the 2007 fiscal year, Xing is skipping all the way to the bank.
So what are these grand numbers being attributed to? Aside from snatching up business-oriented social networks across Europe, Xing has also spent a good portion of 2007 expanding its eCommerce and Advertising segments, which have enabled Xing to layer in two additional streams of revenue. As networks like News Corp. begin to launch their own centralized advertising networks, it’s clear that having a comprehensive ad network of one’s own is an option that is being readily explored in hopes of retaining as much of that profit as possible.
eCommerce is another segment that makes sense for the demographic that Xing reaches out to, and layers in nicely with the other action-oriented aspects of the network that Xing has been improving in the past year as well. Providing more tools for the self-promotion of oneself has seemingly been central to Xing’s improvement to-do list, so incorporating more ways in which to have a farther reach is evident in such changes mandated by Xing, including the network’s participation in Open Social.