Wanna’ know how many active users LinkedIn actually has, as opposed to total members, which is LinkedIn’s own reporting stat of choice?
This may help. Under the new EU Digital Services Act (D.S.A.) , all large online platforms are required to regularly report their EU user counts, in order to ensure transparency.
Which LinkedIn reported late last week:
As you can see in this chart, LinkedIn is currently serving 47.9 million EU users per month.
That’s an increase on LinkedIn’s previous D.S.A. report, which it published in October last year, in which LinkedIn reported that it was seeing 45.2 million M.A.U. in Europe. Which means that LinkedIn is growing, though it’s only added 2.7 million European users in 6 months.
Which adds a lot more context to the story that LinkedIn prefers to tell, in terms of overall members.
Last week, as part of parent company Microsoft’s latest performance update, LinkedIn reported seeing “record levels” of engagement once again, while also posting a new milestone of a billion total members.
But total members is a pointless stat, which adds nothing to our contextual understanding of its performance. As I noted last week, X (formerly Twitter) is currently hosting over 1.5 billion dormant profiles. Which, if it used LinkedIn’s reporting logic, would mean that X could claim to have over 2 billion members.
But if those users are not active, then it doesn’t really matter, right?
What matters, to advertisers, and to those looking to get an understanding of the relative popularity of each platform, is how many people are actually using each, which, for LinkedIn, based on its EU user stats, is actually more like 40% of its member count.
Which suggests that LinkedIn currently has around 400 million monthly active users.
Which is not bad for a niche social media network, but it does mean that LinkedIn’s usage trails behind pretty much every other social app. That’s why LinkedIn would prefer to keep the focus on members instead, and “record high” usage, without any qualification for such.
And that’s fine, I guess, if it can get away with it. Though again, I doubt that any other social platform could get away with such vague reporting.
But if you want some idea of LinkedIn’s actual active usage, these figures provide some indication.
Thanks to Xavier Degraux for the heads up on the latest reports.