Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Microsoft’s LinkedIn subsidiary, speaks at a LinkedIn event in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 2016.
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Influencer marketing has become big business on TikTok and Instagram, where popular creators can make good money by helping brands promote their stuff. Now, LinkedIn wants in the game.
As of last week, LinkedIn is letting advertisers pay to amplify posts from users, including those with sizable followings. Its product, called Thought Leader ads, launched in a limited capacity last year.
The Microsoft-owned business is looking for a jolt, as LinkedIn’s revenue growth has been stuck in single digits since 2022. The company is turning to its membership, which topped 1 billion in November, to help fuel expansion.
Influencer marketing to date has largely been a phenomenon of consumer apps, where shticks and gimmicks can turn internet-savvy creators into celebrities with millions of followers. Almost two-thirds of U.S. social media marketing dollars this year will flow to Instagram parent Meta and TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance, with Instagram and TikTok picking up a combined 2 percentage points of additional share by 2026, according to estimates from eMarketer.
LinkedIn, which was launched a year before Facebook, will grab just 4% of the market, equal to $4.5 billion in marketing revenue, eMarketer says, and its share will remain flat over the next two years.
“It takes a long time for ads and ad formats to really take root,” said Max Willens, a senior analyst at eMarketer, referring to LinkedIn’s latest endeavor.
LinkedIn introduced Thought Leader ads last year but with limited use. Brands could only amplify posts from their own employees. Mastercard, for example, promoted posts written by some of its leaders in Singapore, with one receiving over 500 notifications on the first day. LinkedIn has used Thought Leaders ads itself for some posts from operating chief Dan Shapero, but not yet for CEO Ryan Roslansky.
By opening up Thought Leader ads, LinkedIn is letting anyone boost a post as long as the author grants permission. Social media marketer Brendan Gahan is so bullish on the format that he’s focusing much of his efforts on helping companies use Thought Leader ads.
“In an era where brand safety is a big issue, LinkedIn has a leg up, particularly in contrast to Twitter,” said Gahan, who started an agency last year called Creator Authority, referring to the social media platform now known as X.
X lost some leaders working on brand safety last year, just as the Elon Musk-owned platform was seeing a surge in hate speech on the app.
LinkedIn has long been an effective site for advertisers because members list their employment details, making it easy for brands to target ads to relevant audiences. Advertising skews toward business-focused products like software and computer infrastructure, though automakers, universities and banks also use the network to reach potential customers.
“If you’re looking to sell a high-end B2B product, and you know the buying group is a CFO and someone in finance and like someone in HR, we can literally put ads in front of those specific people on LinkedIn, because the first-party data is so strong,” Roslansky said at a conference in late 2022.
Thought Leader ads came about after employees saw marketing clients promoting screenshots of other users’ content. Since turning on the offering last fall, the ads have yielded higher engagement than regular ads that run with images, said Abhishek Shrivastava, a LinkedIn vice president of product management.
“Humanizing your brand is critical for B2B and has been underused in that space,” said Shrivastava, adding that clients are very excited about it.
It might not be cheap. Racking up a thousand ad impressions generally costs more on LinkedIn than on Instagram or TikTok, partly because the company charges more for advertisers to reach its more affluent user base. Shrivastava said that rather than comparing the costs to other sites, brands will look at the sales and business leads they get from running ads.
For months, project management software startup ClickUp has been paying to promote LinkedIn posts from its own executives. Chris Cunningham, head of social marketing at the company, said traditional ads on LinkedIn can sometimes be repetitive and generic, and he’s eager to see how promoted posts will perform when influencers get involved.
On other social networks, ClickUp has found more success promoting posts from creators than with standard ads, Cunningham said. Plus, he said, “it’s super easy.”
Betsy Hindman, a marketer in Tennessee who helps companies make the most of their LinkedIn presence, said a brand ambassador with an audience can have a bigger impact than a typical ad.
“It’s part of a full end-to-end strategy that includes warming people up along the way with whatever type of content they respond to,” she said.
Building up a roster of creators will likely take time. Some influencers are represented by agencies, and LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager advertising system doesn’t have an automatic process for connecting media buyers with agencies.
“That’s a direction we are exploring,” Shrivastava said.
More data will soon be available to advertisers. Starting in a few weeks, LinkedIn members will be able to look up any company’s collection of ads and see its Thought Leader ads, a spokesperson said. That could help advertisers see what works best.
One potential boon for LinkedIn rests with the fate of TikTok. The app faces a possible ban in the U.S. after the House of Representatives passed legislation last month that would force ByteDance to sell it within six months. Momentum has since slowed, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urged lawmakers to take action on the matter earlier this week.
Willens from eMarketer said agencies are keeping an eye on the issue, but said “nobody feels there’s an imminent threat.”
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
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Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.