It represents 19.4% of LinkedIn’s total revenue. According to their 2015 financial results, Marketing Solutions revenue increased 20% year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $183 million and increased 28% to $581 million in 2015.

Are the above points too indirect? Then consider that LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions, which offers promtoional services to marketers such as sponsored content, sponsored InMail, display ads, text ads, and more.

Jason Miller, who was previously with Marketo, is now the global content marketing leader at the company and produces epic content marketing materials such as The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing.

LinkedIn has become a powerful distribution channel for content marketing - and a source of thought leadership on this subject too.

You might protest that’s for sales, not marketing, but aren’t these two functions increasingly entwined in a digital world? LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great example of the company marketing this capability.

It’s almost certainly the #1 social media platform for social selling - learning about individual prospects, networking within accounts, and identifying targeted referral opportunities.

But it’s not entirely dissimilar either, in spirit or tactic. I know, “personal branding” isn’t the same as brand branding - so you might argue that this isn’t really marketing so much as simply modern career management.

It’s the de facto platform that professionals across the business world use to market themselves to employers.

If you skeptically raised one eyebrow with that last statement, you might be thinking, “Umm, LinkedIn isn’t really a marketing technology company.” But here are a few reasons why we can - and should - think of them that way: I’d also claim that it’s the largest marketing technology acqusition ever. This is the largest acqusition in Microsoft’s history - over three times the size of its acqusition of Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011 - and one of the largest in the history of the digital age (we’ll graciously look past that whole AOL acquiring TimeWarner fiasco). Last week, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion.

Linkedin is a microsoft company