LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is the only social media site that I use now. In the past, I've used Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I dropped off Facebook and Instagram back in 2018. They were great for sharing things with family and a small group of friends, but the benefits weren't worth the costs to me of being a Zuckerberg customer. I was a Twitter lurker for many years -- read many posts but did not post all that often myself. I closed my account when Elon Musk acquired the company because, well, F-T-G.

I created my LinkedIn account in 2003, so I've been a user for twenty years. At first, I tried to carefully curate my account -- only accepting connections from people I knew. My viewpoint back then was that anyone in my connection list was only a phone call or email away. If I reached out, they would respond. Ultimately, it was an impossible task. To wit. I am on the operating side of ParkerGale, but I still get inbound connection requests from bankers. There is no upside in turning down their connection request. At first, I'd steer them toward one of my deal partners in a polite email response. That was too much work, so I started accepting more requests than I wanted. I still turn down more requests than I take, but my connection group is still far less curated than I would like. This has the side effect of making my feed longer.

I've been a premium member since 2016. Premium gives me InMail access and the ability to see who has viewed my profile. I'm not sure that's worth $59.95 a month, but it is what it is. Despite being a paying member, LinkedIn fills my feed with a metric ton of advertisements. At this point, every third or fourth post is an advertisement -- and almost all of these are auto-play videos. I disabled auto-play, but video images take up valuable screen real estate. It's a real teeth grinder.

You can hide any advertisement, but LinkedIn only allows for two reasons for hiding an ad:

This isn’t what I want; I want more central control over my feed. What I want to be able to do is block ads at the COMPANY level.

Let me give you an example. I hate Pepsi and don’t eat salty snacks like potato chips, so I don’t need to hear from Pepsi’s Renfield (Frito-Lay), either. When I ask for a Diet Coke at a restaurant, and the waitress responds by asking whether Pepsi is ok — I say, “No, it isn’t ok; I’ll go with ice water.” I hate Pepsi products THAT much. If LinkedIn shows me a Pepsi advertisement, I want a radio-button choice on the “hide” panel that says:

“Do not show me ANY advertisements from this company”

And then, I don’t want to see Pepsi ads on my feed ever again. Full stop.

It’s good for Pepsi AND me. They don’t need to waste resources showing me advertisements I will never click through. Sure, Pepsi might come out with a future product I would love, and I’ll miss out on it. I’ll take that chance.

I’m not an ad-tech guru, so I am guessing there might be challenges in making this all work. But this is what I want. It is much easier in the flow of reading my feed to simply “block” companies I don’t want to hear from than trying to fill out a profile of companies or product categories I want to see.

Maybe LinkedIn uses machine learning and AI to de-emphasize companies that show me “annoying or not interesting” ads. I want to be explicit about it.