Listen on Apple • Listen on Spotify
Voice note from Ashley Leeds about negative effects of invitations not being accepted.
This week, I’ve seen lots of people reporting very low impression counts.
Microsoft/LinkedIn official stats for the end of October 2026
My LinkedIn membership tracker
Full transcript.
How much can we trust LinkedIn’s numbers? It’s episode 508 of the Informed podcast.
Hi, everyone, I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a weekly show about LinkedIn best practice.
I said last week that I probably wouldn’t be doing a show this week, but I reminded myself that of course Microsoft have released their quarterly results, and that means a load of numbers relating to LinkedIn get published and I didn’t want to wait a week before sharing that with you. So, we’re going to dig into that.
But very first thing to say is that we have a quick Postbag item, and this one comes to us from LinkedIn trainer Ashley Leeds.
Ashley Leeds 00:47 – 01:09
If someone blocks my connection request or message, will LinkedIn penalise me?
So, if I’m busy sending out loads of messages and connection requests and people decide they don’t want to connect with me, so they block me, is that going to count against me?
Asking for a friend, obviously. Keep up the good work. We love your show!
Yeah, good question, Ashley. I don’t think we have any firm stats on this one, but it does certainly make sense that if you were to send out loads and loads of invitations and they were not accepted then why should LinkedIn try and promote you across the platform, because it looks like you might be a spammer.
There are a couple of ways that you can avoid accepting an invitation on the other side of this.
So, you could just hit the Ignore button, I suppose. Actually there’s a third way. You could just leave an invitation to rot. You could never touch it at all.
But most people, if they don’t want to accept an invitation, they would just click the Ignore button depending on what view of LinkedIn you’re looking at.
Also, sometimes you will see a follow up link that says “I don’t know this person”, and I think if a lot of people who reject your invitation to connect also click that link, that probably is going to send some kind of negative signal back to LinkedIn.
I suppose that the antidote to that is to try and make sure that you warm up your prospective connections as much as possible by doing things like commenting on their posts and where possible sending an invitation note that doesn’t sound like a salesy intro when you try and connect with people.
That’s trickier than ever on free accounts, because we can only personalise 3 of those per month, but if you’re on Premium there’s no limit to that.
And so I would always personally recommend sending a note so that people have more of a reason to accept your invitation.
But yes, I would say, even though we don’t have the figures to confirm it, if you’re sending out loads and loads of invitations and lots of them are being ignored, that probably doesn’t bode well for your LinkedIn future. So, try to send stuff to people who are likely to accept, I would say. But thank you for the question, Ashley.
The main topic is about whether we should trust LinkedIn’s numbers. A couple of things to say about this.
First of all, several of you have been reporting to me this past week that your impression counts are very low indeed and sometimes so low that it doesn’t make any sense at all, because your engagement counts – that’s the number of reactions and the number of comments you’ve had – might actually be higher than the number of impressions you’ve had, which makes no sense because there’s no way that someone could like something or comment on it if the post wasn’t shown to them.
Remember that impression counts are a measure of the number of times a post has been loaded in the feed, so there’s no way that an engagement count could possibly be higher than that. It doesn’t make any logical sense.
I’ve seen myself that impression counts certainly look a little bit lower than usual this past week, although the numbers do seem to recover if you wait a couple of days. So, that doesn’t give us a lot of faith in what we’re seeing in terms of impression numbers.
But I would always remind people that impression counts don’t necessarily mean that much.
It’s much more important to look at engagement metrics and especially things like comments, because that means that a real named individual has spent a small portion of their day responding to you, and you can trace that back to a real person.
That’s more valuable than just seeing impression numbers tick up.
And of course, as well, the other thing that’s really valuable is how many direct message conversations is your content stimulating?
You can’t see that on a dashboard, unfortunately, but keeping an eye on those things shows that your content is actually landing, and that’s much more important than impression counts.
There’s an argument for saying that we don’t really need to see impression counts unless you’re interested in trying to work with a brand and showing how much influence you can have in terms of how much reach you can have and maybe placing adverts.
But for the average user who is just trying to put something out and wants to stimulate conversation so they can start new business, it’s the engagement metrics that matter. It’s not the pure number of people who see a post.
I don’t think there’s any plan for LinkedIn to remove impression counts. I’m just saying it’s just not as important as we would think.
And the other thing related to this is all of the numbers that LinkedIn and Microsoft with them have shared in the past week, so that’s what we’re going to talk about now.
Every quarter, Microsoft release their financial results. And because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, then the numbers get kind of rolled together and included in their press briefings, and they did one of these quarterly results on Wednesday.
And so in those results we can now see that LinkedIn now has 1.4 billion members.
I think that number is disputed because actually that’s probably a count of the number of accounts that have been created as opposed to the number of unique users.
As people have pointed out, the top country by users is the USA, and LinkedIn is claiming that they have 265 million members.
Well, that’s very unlikely, because the total population of the USA is 350 million, and I think 18% of the US population is under the age of 16 and therefore couldn’t have a LinkedIn account.
So, it seems very sketchy to suggest that there are actually 265 million members in the US. Nevertheless, these numbers have come out, and I’ve reported them in a post.
I’m going to quickly read out what those numbers are and I’ll point as well to an article where I’m tracking all of these numbers in the long term.
So, they’ve said 1.4 billion members. Take that with a pinch of salt.
They’ve said 10+ million members are using LinkedIn AI-powered job search daily.
25,000 customers are using agentic hiring solutions – that’s another AI-related stat.
There’s been a 15% year on year increase in time spent viewing content in the feed. Microsoft and LinkedIn will be very happy about that, because more people engaged on the platform means more income in the long term for the business.
There’s been a 10% growth in LinkedIn Talent Solutions. That’ll be a lot of money coming LinkedIn’s way.
And then Dan Shapero, who is the CEO of LinkedIn, shared some of his stats as well.
He said that there’s been a 25% year on year increase in paid video ads. I’m surprised at that level of growth, but OK.
There’s been a 63% year on year increase in ads featuring creators. Not particularly impressed by that stat, because I think it would be natural for ads to contain creators in them.
There’s been 121% year on year increase in Premium company pages. I’d like to see the absolute numbers around that, because it sounds an impressive proportion, but if not many people were using Premium company pages before, it doesn’t really mean a lot.
I’m actually coming to the end of a trial of Premium company pages on one of mine, and honestly it hasn’t really helped at all, and I think it’s an expensive solution for what it is.
I don’t like the fact that if you wanted to verify your company page now, you basically need to pay for a Premium company page to do it. And if you wanted to remove fake employees from your account, you need to have a verified company page to do that.
Effectively, it’s gatekeeping being able to do a basic feature like that. I haven’t seen any value in Premium company pages myself.
Anyway, back to the Microsoft and LinkedIn stats, and the top 5 countries by members.
We’ve got the USA at 265 million. We’ve got India 193 million, Brazil at 103 million, the UK at 48 million, and Indonesia at 41 million.
They shared some more stats on their Pressroom page.
There are 110 new people are adding a profile every minute on LinkedIn.
There are 9000 job applications on LinkedIn every minute.
There are 2 million feed updates viewed every minute.
19,000 connections made every minute, and 119 hours of learning content consumed every minute.
And I suppose the big stat, the one that actually LinkedIn and Microsoft care about, is that LinkedIn’s annual revenue is about $20 billion.
It’s an incredible cash cow for Microsoft. They bought the business 10 years ago. I think it was a $26 billion purchase, which probably sounded like quite a lot at the time, but it’s making $20 billion per year at the moment. So, yes, a real cash cow for you there.
As I mentioned earlier, I am running a separate membership tracking page on my blog so I can see how things change over time.
I’m saving all of LinkedIn’s member maps so I can do comparisons of how the numbers change.
The most interesting question I always get about all of these stats is how many people are really on LinkedIn?
You know, forget about what LinkedIn say about the total number of users. And we know it doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny because, we just know that there’s bound to be loads of fake accounts, there’s bound to be loads of duplicate accounts, there’s bound to be loads of dormant accounts.
How many people are actually using the platform?
What I’ve done is I’ve taken some data that LinkedIn have disclosed in their EU users and worked out that, roughly speaking, they’ve got about 30% of active users in the EU.
And then we can just kind of scale that up and imagine if it were 30%, what would that mean for a worldwide user base?
So, given that they now have 1.4 billion accounts or so, they say 30% of that would come in at 420 million active users.
Only a small proportion of those people are actually creating content on a regular basis or commenting on other people’s stuff or regularly sending direct messages.
So, sometimes it might feel like, you know, you’re trying your best to show up on LinkedIn and maybe do a post here and there and leave a comment here and there, leave direct messages here and there, and you might think that it’s just a tiny bit of noise in the crowd, but actually, there really aren’t that many active users, and LinkedIn defines an active user as someone who’s just logged in once per month and even fewer people who are really like, daily active and actually putting stuff on the platform or contributing in some way.
Don’t give up, basically, because you’re part of a small percentage of people who are really actively trying to get the best out of the platform.
Those are the stats. I will link to the membership tracker so you can go and take a look.
If you are cynical about some of these numbers, I really don’t blame you, because I don’t fully trust what LinkedIn is telling us.
I’ve got no real way of checking all of this, but nevertheless, go and check it out, see what you think, and let me know.
Keeping the episode short this week, as I said, I didn’t think I was going to be publishing anything.
My work this week is really focused on the Espresso+ Roundup, because there’s been loads of changes on LinkedIn in the past month, and I’m going to be documenting those for people inside the Espresso+ community.
Hopefully, I’ll be back next week with a normal episode of the Informed podcast.
Keep your voice, notes and questions coming, and I’ll speak to you all again soon.
