Xing, the listed business network based in Germany, launched a partner program which pays cash for recommendations which lead to new member registrations – irrespective of whether these registrations are for basic (free), or premium (paying) memberships.

The program was launched in the three German-speaking countries Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Xing pays €2 per new member (in Switzerland 3 Swiss franc) and money is paid out once a month.

“We kicked off with the program in Austria, Switzerland and Germany to collect experience. When we are ready, we’ll take it to other countries, such as Italy, Spain and Turkey,” said Thorsten Vespermann, director of corporate communications at Xing.  

The program uses the technology of TradeDoubler, a leading performance marketer in Europe. Operators of websites and/or blogs may apply to become partners of Xing. Once accepted as partners, they may place any number of a range of advertisement types and sizes on their websites and/or blogs. TradeDoubler creates a separate account on Xing for every partner, where money owed is reflected. 

The partner program went online in the second week of June, after a beta test conducted in April with 2,000 invited members.    

Xing has experienced tremendous growth in membership in the past three years from 1.7 million in 2006 (at the time of listing) to 7.5 million in the first quarter of 2009. The ratio of paying members to total members has been stable at about 8 percent in recent years, said Vespermann. 

The geographic spread of the paying members shows a clear bias towards the German-speaking countries, with less than 10 percent living outside these countries.

The ratio of 8 percent is suspected to be much higher than that of the much bigger competitor Linkedin, but it cannot be said for sure, since Linkedin does not publish these numbers.   

“Over the years we have learned that recommendations and word-of-mouth bring over half our new members. We wanted to capitalize on this trend and launched the affiliate program as an alternative way to recommend members,” said Vespermann.

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