Since January 2011, the company had received a total of $103 million (about $141 million in 2024) of investment. The platform has also been criticized for its poor handling of misinformation and disinformation, particularly pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the 2020 US presidential election. 94% of business-to-business marketers since 2017 use LinkedIn to distribute their content. In May 2026, LinkedIn introduced an agency certification initiative intended to help advertisers identify firms with experience using the platform's advertising and campaign tools. From 2015, most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals; LinkedIn also introduced its own ad portal named LinkedIn Ads to let companies advertise in its platform. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, as it allows jobseekers to post their CVs and employers to post their job listings. We regularly update our app to fix bugs, improve performance and add new features to help you connect with your professional network and advance your career. LinkedIn has published blog posts using economic graph data to research several topics on the job market, including popular destination cities of recent college graduates, areas with high concentrations of technology skills, and common career transitions. In June 2014, the company announced its "Galene" search architecture to give users access to the economic graph's data with more thorough filtering of data, via user searches like "Engineers with Hadoop experience in Brazil." The new Business Manager is a centralized platform designed to make it easier for large companies and agencies to manage people, ad accounts, and business pages. The new plugin allowed potential employees to apply for positions using their LinkedIn profiles as resumes. According to Jack Meyer, the site has become the "premier digital platform" for professionals to network online. Users can share posts, write articles, and interact with content to demonstrate expertise and remain visible within their networks. LinkedIn further supports personal branding through interactive features that encourage ongoing engagement and credibility building. Career coach Pamela Green describes a personal brand as the "emotional experience you want people to have as a result of interacting with you," and a LinkedIn profile is an aspect of that. This also lets it train machine learning models that can infer new properties about an entity or further information that may apply to it for both summary views and analytics. LinkedIn maintains an internal knowledge graph of entities (people, organizations, groups) that helps it connect everyone working in a field or at an organization or network. In November 2013, LinkedIn announced the addition of Showcase Pages to the platform. Applications must go through a review process and request permission from the user before accessing a user's data. However, in some cases, it could refer to sanctioned applications featured on a user's profile page. LinkedIn solicits endorsements using algorithms that generate skills members might have. Without giving its users any prior notice, Linkedin has been removing accounts that do not follow its criteria since 2022. Later in July of that year, the company removed its protections against the misgendering and deadnaming of transgender users. The German Stiftung Warentest has criticized that the balance of rights between users and LinkedIn is disproportionate, restricting users' rights excessively while granting the company far-reaching rights. Users were locked out of their accounts and threatened with permanent account deletion if they did not pay a ransom. The project's vision was to include all the job listings in the world, all the skills required to get those jobs, all the professionals who could fill them, and all the companies (nonprofit and for-profit) at which they work. LinkedIn launched its carousel ads feature in 2018, making it the newest addition to the platform's advertising options. The blue Top Voice badge is an invitation-only, awarded by LinkedIn's editorial team to members who consistently share original professional insights and contribute meaningfully to discussions on the platform. Since 2015, LinkedIn has published annual rankings of Top Voices on the platform, recognizing "members that generated the most engagement and interaction with their posts." Such data may include the ratio of female to male employees, the percentage of the most common titles/positions held within the company, the location of the company's headquarters and offices, and a list of present and former employees. LinkedIn provided the City of New York with data from economic graph showing "in-demand" tech skills for the city's "Tech Talent Pipeline" project. In 2015, LinkedIn added an analytics tool to its publishing platform. With carousel ads, businesses can showcase their products or services through a series of swipeable cards, each with its unique image, headline, and description. Individuals and companies can now pay a fee to have LinkedIn sponsor their content and spread it to its user base. Recipients are selected based on factors such as content quality, subject-matter expertise, community engagement, and adherence to LinkedIn’s professional standards.