LinkedIn's Growth Impresses But Still An Early Adopter Toy
If you are reading the a:c you are probably an early tech adopter and LinkedIn seems like old hat. But a report from Hitwise says that while visits to LinkedIN are up 323% year-over-year, its still mostly used by early tech adopters.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Hitwise data behind this story — visits to LinkedIn up 323% year-over-year, with its audience overlapping heavily with Gmail users — landed the same day as the site's own coverage of the 323% traffic surge, and it cuts both ways: spectacular growth, but concentrated in exactly the early-adopter crowd reading about it.
The demographic caveat matters because of what came before it: in late June 2007 LinkedIn hired a former TiVo CFO as part of a management build-out, was reported to be gearing up as one of the first big post-dotcom Internet IPOs with explosively growing revenues, and Reid Hoffman committed publicly to shipping developer APIs within nine months. A pre-IPO company whose growth is real but demographically narrow has something to prove.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn's IPO positioning now leans on a growth number (323%) that Hitwise's own analysis qualifies as an early-adopter phenomenon, so the company must show mainstream traction before a public offering, not just velocity.
- Hoffman's promised developer APIs become the immediate lever against the 'toy' framing — third-party integration is the concrete mechanism available to push LinkedIn beyond the Gmail-overlapping tech set.
Second-order effects
- If LinkedIn opens up via APIs, recruiters and business-tool builders gain a distribution channel into mainstream professionals, shifting the battleground from sign-ups to embedded usage inside other products.
- Rivals in professional networking face pressure to match platform openness or concede the integration layer, since Hitwise-style traffic measurement makes audience composition visible to advertisers and acquirers alike.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward professional networking consolidating around whichever service converts an early-adopter core into general business infrastructure first — the same conversion test every consumer web startup of the era faces before going public.
- Audience-composition analytics from firms like Hitwise are becoming a standard check on headline growth numbers, meaning pre-IPO web companies are judged on who their users are, not just how many.
The trend: Consumer web companies of the post-dotcom wave are being pushed to convert early-adopter traction into mainstream usage — through open platforms and measured audience breadth — before public markets will price them as more than niche tools.