LinkedIn now has 400M users, but only 25% of them use it monthly

LinkedIn now has 400 million cumulative “members,” the company revealed today, up from 380 million in July.

But LinkedIn’s active user-base is far smaller: the company averaged 100 million active users per month for the third quarter of 2015 — up just a bit from 97 million during the previous quarter, according to LinkedIn’s latest earnings.

If you go on the cumulative figures alone, LinkedIn appears markedly larger than Twitter; but that’s not a fair comparison. Twitter, Facebook, and plenty of other social networks consistently rely on “monthly active user” numbers (MAUs) instead — stats which LinkedIn buries below its better-looking cumulative figures.

In LinkedIn’s defense, it’s the only social network of the three that manages to charge users subscription fees while selling ads. During the second quarter this year, LinkedIn made $128 million from premium subscriptions. Last quarter, that number rose to $138 million.

For the third quarter, LinkedIn scraped up revenues of $780 million and $0.78 earnings per share — analysts on average predicted the company would report revenues of $755.64 million and $0.46 earnings per share. With better-than-expected results, the company’s stock jumped more than 9 percent after hours.

Here’s a closer look at LinkedIn’s 2015 MAU growth, alongside Twitter’s and Facebook’s*.

*Facebook has yet to report its third-quarter results.