LinkedIn Beats Again as Revenue Jumps to $364 Million

Another earnings season, another beat from the Internet company that can seemingly do no financial wrong.

LinkedIn reported second-quarter earnings results on Thursday, with earnings per share of 38 cents on revenue of $364 million. That easily beats analysts’ consensus of an EPS of 31 cents on revenue of $353.85 million.

“Accelerated member growth and strong engagement drove record operating and financial results in the second quarter,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a canned statement. “We are continuing to invest in driving scale across the LinkedIn platform in order to fully realize our long-term potential.”

Ostensibly, that investment likely covers major acquisitions like the $90 million purchase of Pulse in April, as well as the company’s continued aggressive stance on recruiting to build out its product offerings. Not to mention the company’s ongoing data center infrastructure expansion project.

Thursday’s beat is just another in a string of wins since the company went public in 2011, a feat which has placed the company above a number of its consumer Internet company compatriots as of late; Zynga and Groupon, for instance, also went public at a similar time to LinkedIn, though both have drastically underperformed over the past year and a half.

As always, the bulk of the company’s revenue was comprised of the Talent Solutions group, which accounted for $205.1 million, an increase of 69 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

The rest came from the “Marketing Solutions” group (i.e., “ads”), which accounted for $85.6 million, and the company’s premium subscriptions service, which added another $73 million.

In the marketing department in particular, the company has been dabbling with a new “sponsored updates” product, which rolled out this week to all ad partners. Weiner said on Thursday’s conference call that lead-generation is “promising” in this new product, and LinkedIn will ramp up its efforts on this product over time, with hopes of it accounting for a larger share of revenue by 2014.

Some other highlights:

• Membership is still growing. The company reported 238 million users, a jump of 37 percent compared to the year-ago-quarter.
• Apparently LinkedIn’s “Influencer” program — the product that has guest posts from big names like Bill Gates, Richard Branson and others — is working: Homepage traffic from Influencer posts more than doubled from the year previous.

Shares of LinkedIn jumped nearly six-and-a-half percent in after-hours, hovering in the $227 price range.