Xing saw its profits rise with a good 10 million euros to 35.3 million. Most of the money comes from subscription feels. Paying customers have more rights, for example to search for people, than non-paying members. Xing has 550,000 paying customers, 188,000 more than a year ago. That's 8% of the total members.

Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article

Slowly we’re discovering the real business models of the virtual world, the long-promised internet business models. We start for free and then add continuously more value. At some point, it becomes so valuable that people gladly pay for it. And that’s exactly what we see happening here.

And at the same time, advertisements will start to disappear. That model comes from a completely different era and is well past its peak.

Related trends

• Experiences

• in Dutch