Introducing contextual ads, the social net aims to attract a number of big advertisers. The company has lately recruited a few big advertisers such as American Express Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co. . At the present moment advertising represents roughly a third of the closely held company's revenue, with the rest coming from subscription services and recruiting tools, but the company is planning to enlarge that share.

LinkedIn is considered to be the potential rival of the world’s biggest social network Facebook. Experts mark that LinkedIn has a large and stably growing audience, besides that, for 2010 the financial activities of the company have dramatically increased. At the same time, WSJ notes, that it is too early to talk about a serious competition between LinkedIn and Facebook. According to the journal, the average Facebook user spent nearly five and a half hours flipping through user profiles, commenting on photos and playing games, whereas the average LinkedIn user was there just 12 minutes. The total number of LinkedIn users is about 90 million, while Facebook has about 600 million registered accounts.

On 27th of January it came out that Facebook allowed advertisers to use status-messages for their purposes, with brand names mentioned in them. So, the content of the advertisement will be created by the users themselves. The advertisement, marked as "Sponsored Story", will have a contextual character and will be shown first of all to the friends of the user, who has written a status with the brand's name.