Content marketing accounts for huge chunk of LinkedIn’s ad revenue

The walls between PR, marketing and advertising continue to break down.

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LinkedIn reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2015 on Thursday, and it cast a light on the ongoing breakdown of barriers between PR, advertising and marketing.

CEO Jeff Weiner said on a conference call with investors that the social media platform’s Sponsored Updates program—a content marketing service that enables advertisers to pay to put posts on LinkedIn users’ home pages—accounted for a full 40 percent of overall marketing revenue. The company’s advertising revenue grew overall by 38 percent.

In 2014, Sponsored Updates accounted for 23 percent of advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, display ads took a hit. This was “the first quarter where traditional on-site ads comprised less than 50 percent” of advertising revenue, said Chief Financial Officer Steve Sordello, and that’s “a trend we expect will continue.”

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