The Czech LinkedIn feed looks the same every morning. Founders announce a new investment round, consultants post carousels about leadership, marketing managers report promotions. Almost none of them are full-time creators. Yet this very group earns the most on the network.
The professional network owned by Microsoft says it has more than a billion members in over 200 countries. Between 2021 and 2025 the number of creators on LinkedIn almost doubled, according to the company. Journalist Natalie Jarvey summed this up in her newsletter Like & Subscribe with a single rule: “Please Keep Your Day Job”.
The best creators, according to her article, earn low six figures a year from brand collaborations, while the headline of the report puts the top at up to $500,000. The condition is that they keep their jobs.
A model without full-time creation
Josh Kaplan leads Smooth Media, which represents such creators, and expanded on Jarvey’s finding on LinkedIn. Citing Aneesh Lal, founder of The Wishly Group, he summed up that “the best LinkedIn creators aren't full-time creators”.
Ruffin Mitchener, who built the investor community Brydge Club on the network, described LinkedIn in the same article as “the best platform in terms of building a professional network”. Jack Westerkamp of Breaking & Entering Media said that “LinkedIn has served as the foundation for our entire business”.
These people treat LinkedIn as a distribution channel for their expertise. Authority in a narrow field, from cybersecurity to angel investing, can be turned into a client, a partnership or a hire here. Hari Srinivasan, who leads product strategy at LinkedIn, frames it with the words “People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise”. They earn here from the business relationships that the content creates.
Notion and HubSpot send part of their budget to LinkedIn
Brands with budgets are also heading for creators on the professional network. According to Digiday, in 2025 HubSpot was putting around 10% of its influencer budget into LinkedIn, while Notion raised the platform’s share from roughly 25% to around 40%, with a 45% outlook.
LinkedIn has also launched its own monetisation. The BrandLink programme, from May 2025, runs 15-second ad spots ahead of creators’ and publishers’ content and shares the revenue with them. The Creator Match tool, according to the same text, has paid creators over $1 million. April Little, who has more than 250,000 followers on LinkedIn, earned around $150,000 over two years.
For a European brand director, this is a signal of where part of influencer marketing is moving, marketing that has so far aimed mainly at Instagram and TikTok. On LinkedIn you pay for the trust of an audience that makes purchasing decisions within a company.
Substack and X compete for the same creators
Business journalist Jeremy Berke, under Kaplan’s post, described how his brand Cultivated builds on LinkedIn and YouTube, while on X it stays mainly out of habit. Substack also competes for the same creators and their time.
Kaplan asks whether, as the network matures, “true LinkedIn-native creators” will emerge, meaning creators for whom LinkedIn will be the main platform. So far, he says, comments under posts stay at “congrats” and “personal news”. He compares the current state to Twitter at the start of the previous decade, whose culture was only then producing its first native creators.
The DSA places stricter obligations on LinkedIn
For European brands LinkedIn also adds a regulatory dimension. The European Commission designated it on 25 April 2023 as a very large online platform under the Digital Services Act, that is, a service with more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU. The designation brings stricter obligations on moderation, advertising and the assessment of systemic risks, which also concern paid creator collaborations targeting European audiences.
The model emerging on LinkedIn values credibility in a specific field more than reach. The creator here operates as a brand with one employee. For the most successful, the day job is also the source of the content that sustains them.
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