LinkedIn Ad Network

When many popular social networking sites are still trying to figure out how to make money from online advertising, one social network is way ahead in the trend.

LinkedIn, which is a very popular social network for business professionals, has already so much demand from advertisers that it will be launching its own ad network this coming Monday.

LinkedIn will be working with another high-ed media ad network Collective Media, to let other select sites target its users when they visit those partner sites.

Most of the social networks today have a hard time selling ads at more than $1 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), but LinkedIn’s rate card shows display ads starting at $30 CPMs and going up to over $76. Their current text ads range from $12 up to $20 CPMs. LinkedIn is likely to do much better in terms of ad delivery than most of social networks because it has a more desirable audience that advertisers want to reach.

LinkedIn claims it currently has over 27 million registered users. According to comScore, 5.2 million from the U.S. visited the site in July (8.7 million worldwide). LinkedIn claims that the average household income of its members is $110,000, 64 percent are male, the average age is 41, and 49 percent are decision makers. (In contrast, the average Wall Street Journal reader, according to LinkedIn, makes $102,000 per household, is 48 years old, and only 40 percent are business decision makers).