LinkedIn history timeline

Yes, LinkedIn also offers a Basic (free) account apart from its premium, paid subscriptions.
Here is what a free LinkedIn account allows you to do:
· Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates.
· Request and provide recommendations.
· Search for and view other LinkedIn members’ profiles.
· Save a maximum of three searches and get weekly alerts on those searches.
· Receive unlimited InMail messages.

Based on LinkedIn’s quarterly SEC filings, its main source of revenue is generated by its talent solutions (recruitment services), marketing solutions (advertising sales), and premium subscriptions (membership privileges). A supplementary revenue driver is the company’s learning division, Learning Solutions.

LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman, Eric Ly, and other team members from Socialnet.com and PayPal (namely, Stephen Beitzel, Allen Blue, David Eves, Konstantin Guericke, Lee Hower, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante, Chris Saccheri, Jean-Luc Vaillant).

With LinkedIn’s acquisition completed in December 2016, Microsoft is the current owner/parent company of the business networking site which runs its operations and services under the leadership of Ryan Roslansky.

LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011.

The LinkedIn idea started out in the co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room in December 2002 and materialized through the official launch of its associated website on May 5, 2003.

After its launch in May 2003, LinkedIn slowly gathered a mere 245 members by the end of that same year. However, once Sequoia Capital led the Series A investment in the company, LinkedIn took off and reached 1 million users in 2004, seeing accelerated growth as more features were rolled out to appeal to small business owners. With membership exceeding 1 million and two business lines launched (Jobs and Subscriptions) by 2005, LinkedIn started generating revenue and reached profitability in March 2006.
As things got more lucrative throughout 2007, Reid Hoffman decided to focus on running the product and stepped down from the role of CEO, passing the reigns to Dan Nye. In 2008, after 5 years dedicated to growing within the U.S., LinkedIn took the first steps toward becoming a global social network, opening international offices in the UK, Spain, and France. One year later, it started its Asia-Pacific team expansion, with offices set up in Mumbai, India and Sydney, Australia.
Hitting a huge growth milestone with 90 million members and 1,000 users in 2010, LinkedIn opened an International Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and received a $20 million investment from Tiger Global Management LLC at a valuation of approximately $2 billion. In January 2011, LinkedIn went public and started trading four months later.
Once its IPO was filed, LinkedIn invested in improving its website’s underlying infrastructure to allow faster revision-release cycles and saw its earnings soar due to the company’s increased success in the social media world. This gained attention from Microsoft, which decided to acquire LinkedIn for 196$ a share in December 2016, the deal’s total value amounting to $26.2 billion and making for the second largest acquisition made by Microsoft to date.
Since then, LinkedIn had seen steady growth until 2020, when the COVID pandemic forced the leadership to lay off about 6% of its total workforce, from the talent acquisition and global sales teams. The following year, Microsoft decided to end LinkedIn operations in China.
As of February 2022, LinkedIn has more than 830 million registered members from over 200 countries and territories.

Based on the total number of registered members from a specific country, statistics show that the U.S. uses LinkedIn the most (with over 171 million users), followed by India, where the count rises to more than 69 million members.