As Lehman Fails, LinkedIn Flourishes

As “the tectonic plates beneath the world financial system are shifting,” LinkedIn is surviving — thriving, in fact — and launching its own ad network to target what it calls the “new influencers.”

LinkedIn, which has chosen to work with ad network Collective Media (which targets high-end media sites), will tag its 27 million users using “cookies” to identify them when they visit partner websites. LinkedIn says it will have hundreds of publishing partners involved in the network, charging between $30 and $76.50 per thousand views for a display ad.

According to TechCrunch, LinkedIn is able to charge this premium because it is doing much better than most social networks, and because it has a more desirable audience that advertisers want to reach.

But what does this mean for LinkedIn’s users, who have been providing an open window into their career and industry information for the past five years? Will this advertising news scare them off, causing them to shut that window completely?

Will this hinder third-party recruiters’ networking and sourcing abilities, while simultaneously helping corporate recruiters?

The British newspaper The Guardian quotes Kevin Eyres, the LinkedIn Europe managing director, who says that “with recruitment, we’re finding that people are looking at how they can use other technology to ensure their spending is most effective. [The brewer] SAB Miller did not use a third-party recruiter - they used the power of their networks via LinkedIn and saved £1.2 million recruiting 102 people.”