LinkedIn (LNKD) said Wednesday morning that its professional online network has now reached 200 million members. The headline here reads “Tops 200 Million,” as the social giant is adding new members at a rate of two per second, meaning that from the 9:00 AM ET release date alone, 2,700 people worldwide have joined at 10:30 AM.
The Mountain View, California-based company has added more than 13 million members since its last report on November 1, 2012. The 100 million-member mark was struck in March 2011. LinkedIn was launched in early 2003 and went public in May 2011.
In case you’re wondering how that compares to Facebook (FB), which launched in 2004; it took Facebook until August of 2008 to hit 100 million members. 200 million came 8 months later in April of 2009. 500 million was hit in July 2010 and the social media beast reported 1 billion in October 2012. So, while not even a completely fair comparison because LinkedIn caters to professionals and Facebook is for everyone, the rate of LinkedIn’s membership growth from 100 million to 200 million is not too shabby.
The company’s statement today states that more than 160 million unique visitors stop by the site every month and that it is the 23rd most visited website in the world. Website ranking firm, Alexa, actually has LinkedIn.com ranked as number 14 globally.
“We recently crossed an important and exciting milestone for the company,” said LinkedIn’s SVP of product & user experience, Deep Nishar, in a blog post. “LinkedIn now counts over 200 million members as part of our network, with representation in more than 200 countries and territories. We serve our members in 19 languages around the world.”
Nishar continue, “This milestone is more than just a metric — it’s a reminder of the global footprint and the scale of impact our network has each day.”
LinkedIn seems to be growing quickly because of traction internationally. While the U.S. is still the largest single-country member base, the company said that its fastest growing markets are Turkey, Colombia and Indonesia currently. On the mobile end, China and Brazil are the countries growing the fastest.
74 million of the 200 million members are located in the United States. India comes in second with 18 million members, followed by Brazil and the United Kingdom with 11 million each.
The largest number of professionals on LinkedIn claim to be in the Information Technology and Services sector (4 million members) with Financial Services (2.03 million members) narrowly taking second ahead of Higher Education (1.95 million members).
The most followed member? Sir Richard Branson with 1.23 million followers. Second? President Barack Obama with 616,072 followers.
Shares of LNKD are trading ahead by 1.3 percent at $112.60 in early morning trading. Shares grew by 83 percent in 2012. Not too shabby in that respect either.
