At the Creator Connect event in New York, LinkedIn opened a creator marketplace directly inside its advertising tool, Campaign Manager. Brands can now find B2B creators by topic in one place, instead of clicking through feeds by hand and cold-calling individuals. The marketplace is in alpha for selected brands and creators in North America, and for now covers only English-language content.
What the marketplace offers brands and creators
A brand in the marketplace searches for creators by topic and opens a card showing follower count, post volume and content samples. After clicking through “creator insights,” it sees views and interaction counts, the full profile and the audience structure by industry, job title and location. Contact with the creator runs via email or the profile.
A creator joins the marketplace voluntarily and decides which data to share and how brands can reach them. It includes monetisation tools on the profile, for which LinkedIn has not announced a rollout date.
The marketplace builds on products that LinkedIn has developed for creators in recent years, among them Top Voices 360 and Advice Sessions. Self-serve BrandLink and organic content discovery, unlike the marketplace itself, are available globally.
The marketplace as an entry point to ad products
Once a brand finds a creator in the marketplace and starts working with them, LinkedIn has a reason to amplify their content with paid formats. For LinkedIn, this means Thought Leader Ads, which promote a post from a personal profile rather than a company page. According to LinkedIn's own data, they achieve a 252% higher click-through rate than single-image ads.
According to EMARKETER's February forecast, spending on boosting creator content on American social networks will match the fees for producing it in 2027, at a level of $14.15 billion. It will overtake them in 2028.
Lindsey Gamble, vice president of creator strategy and innovation at IZEA, whose post about the launch opened the debate, adds that “this marketplace simplifies discovery. More importantly, it gives LinkedIn a way to scale creator marketing beyond the brands and creators already active in the ecosystem.”
What LinkedIn's data says about trust in creators
For B2B, searching by topic and expertise matters more than follower count. “Finding the right creators has been the biggest barrier for brands in B2B. Fit matters more than follower count,” writes Gamble.
The marketplace rests on LinkedIn's own research, the Working with B2B Creators document from 2025. According to it, 87% of B2B buyers prefer trustworthy content from industry influencers. Natalie Silverstein, director of innovation at the agency Collectively, tells Digiday that “a native marketplace could solve a real pain point.”
Creator marketplaces at Meta, TikTok and YouTube
TikTok Creator Marketplace has existed since 2019, and YouTube BrandConnect grew out of FameBit in 2020. Meta opened a creator marketplace on Instagram in the US in 2022 and has gradually expanded it to other countries, while Snapchat added one in 2021.
LinkedIn differs from them by sector. The other marketplaces target consumer campaigns, while LinkedIn is claiming the professional and B2B space, where purchasing decisions are made by people in specific roles and industries.
LinkedIn as a source for AI search engines
The significance of this step goes beyond conventional advertising. As brands work out their visibility in AI-powered search engines, LinkedIn's importance as a source for those tools grows, according to Gamble. “It is already one of the most cited platforms in large language models,” he says in the post. In his view, how brands appear in tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude will depend partly on their visibility through content on LinkedIn, especially through creators.
For the European market the marketplace is not yet available, so European brands and creators cannot use it to find creators.
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