It's Rishi

I was browsing LinkedIn today and noticed something: the advertisements on their site seem to be horribly targeted. For the AdSense ads, I repeatedly got ads for self-storage companies and real-estate search services. I’m not sure what content on my profile and other pages indicate that I might be interested in either of those two categories, but the ads that Google served to me were exclusively those. In LinkedIn’s own “Sponsored links” there’s more crappy ads like for mortgage rates and corporate surveys. It also appears as if LinkedIn has having trouble selling their (non-AdSense) ad space since many pages seem to have less than the max number of ads and the same couple of ads just keep repeating.

In this day and age of Internet advertising, such untargeted ads are pretty appalling. Hey, LinkedIn, do you guys wanna make money? In a recent article, MySpace said that they will be using user profile and behavioral data to better target ads. LinkedIn can and should already be doing the same thing. An easy first step would be to use AdSense’s own section targeting support to focus advertising based on people’s profile summaries. From my profile you can immediatley see key words indicating that I’m a software engineer, founder of a tech startup, a blogger, where I went to school, etc. That’s a lot of valuable data to help improve ad relevancy presented to me. Moreover, if I’m searching for someone in my network with J2ME programming experience, why not serve up ads relevant to Java/wireless development. In this latter example of a search, I have a clear intent for being on the site as opposed to just casual browsing. LinkedIn must make sure to monetize this type of activity.
There may even be some more interesting profiling that can be done by not only looking at people’s own profiles but also looking at the profiles of 1st or even 2nd degree connections.

Anyways, I just found the whole thing pretty shocking. Sites such as LinkedIn generate huge numbers of pageviews yet they generate such small revenue. You’d think that LinkedIn would have done everything possible to maximize the value of their ad space. It seems instead that they’ve already accepted that it sucks and are focusing on premium services. Oh well…