Where is Xing going…other than down?

LinkedIn vs Xing - What are they?

Ever heard of Xing? Its a professional social network like LinkedIn.  Largely they are very similar services but Xing was founded in Europe and LinkedIn is American.

Another major differentiator is their growth style. LinkedIn has focused on scale, scale and more scale along with an Ad platform and a few for Fee services, whereas Xing has focused on growing their for Fee services primarily

Traffic Traffic Traffic……

Having heard previously that Xing was ‘Europe’s’ professional social network I thought I would take a look and try to validate the truth of this whisper, so I took a look at Compete a popular US-based website traffic analysis web service and Alexa an old but global traffic analysis tool.

Compete

Using Compete, I found Xing receives 100,000 visitors a month (June 2008 figures) and although Xing is growing (annually) at just over 400% and amazingly LinkedIn at over 6 million visitors a month yet is managing relative growth of around 350%.

Can Xing ever catch up with their much larger sibling managing nearly equal growth?

A caveat to remember is that Compete focuses on the US market and will therefore always scew that way with their results but even taking that into consideration there is still an astronomical difference between LinkedIn and Xing.

If Xing is doing well in German and Spanish markets then Alexa another popular website analysis service should have the answer.  According to Alexa, Xing is in the top 250 of websites in Germany and Austria but in Spain they only crack the top 2500 of websites.

By comparison Linkedin are in the top 500 for Germany, Austria and Spain which is equal to or a better performance than Xing in Xings own home markets.

I wonder what the future is for Xing with LinkedIn outperforming in America, most of Europe and critically they lead Xing in both China and India the worlds fastest growing economies.  Will Xing get bought up? Will it morph into something else like Flickr did oh so long ago when it was a gaming community or will Xing become a niche player.