XING hits 10 million members

European rival to LinkedIn shows solid growth due to ...

LinkedIn might be one of the biggest sites worldwide devoted to helping professionals network, but it is not the only one by far.

XING, a European-based rival to LinkedIn that launched in 2003, announced Monday that it's reached 10 million members. It's far from LinkedIn's estimated 75 million users reported earlier this month, but certainly a decent and respectable number of professional users that makes the network a useful tool to anyone seeking to make connections with business professionals in Europe.

While it's not clear how many users are in the U.S., the countries with the largest number of member growth include Germany, Spain and Turkey. Some 4.2 million of users come from German-speaking countries. About 1.5 million individuals logged in from Spain, which represents more then a tenth of total users, and Turkey showed up just shy of a million with 980,000 users.

This growth is a result of what XING calls its "most successful period of member growth in the last 15 months." For some perspective on this period of growth, the company reported 460,000 people signed up in the second quarter of this year. The company thinks that the growth is, "proof that our user-oriented strategy was and is the right course to take," according to Stefan Gross-Selbeck, the CEO of XING. That strategy seems to be based on observing what the users wants, and responding to those needs.

This year, Xing generated revenue of € 25.86 million in the first half of this year, with € 20.59 million of that revenue, coming from user subscriptions. The site recently added extra features, including a plugin for Microsoft Outlook, a universal search across both paid and unpaid end users, and the creation of business based profiles for freelancers. 

Despite its rapid growth of late, it doesn't appear XING be taking down LinkedIn anytime soon. But it still offers a valuable tool for the European professional marketplace.