On March 22nd, LinkedIn announced that they had officially crossed the 100 Million member mark.

However, they might have actually crossed the 100 Million member milestone back in January.

How would I know?

I started seriously exploring LinkedIn Ads ever since they announced that they emerged from beta on 1/26/2011, and I noticed that once you configure an ad, LinkedIn displays the total estimated audience based on your targeting, including geography, company, job title, group, gender and age.

When I first looked into LinkedIn Ads, I noticed that the total target audience was somewhere over 99,000,000 when I did not make any targeting selections. I figured this was representative of the total estimated number of LinkedIn profiles worldwide.

Because the figure was so close to 100,000,000, I made a mental note to come back and check in to see if and when the estimated audience crossed the 100M mark.

Back on January 30th, I took a screenshot of a targeted audience of 101,382,559. Continue reading →