LinkedIn passes 1.4bn members as creator ads rise 63%.

LinkedIn says time spent on the platform rose 15% year on year last quarter and membership has passed 1.4 billion. Chief executive Daniel Shapero also said ads featuring creators grew 63% and paid video ads 25%.

Shapero shared the figures alongside Microsoft's results for the first quarter of its 2027 financial year, published on 28 October. He also said 25,000 customers now use LinkedIn's agentic hiring products and that Premium Company subscriptions are up 121%. Membership was 1.3 billion at Microsoft's fourth-quarter update.

The growth follows a push on feed quality and on creators. LinkedIn added an option in August to report AI-generated slop, has cracked down on engagement pods and paid automation tools, and is testing a Network tab and other changes meant to drive engagement. For brands, it has added ways to find creators to work with, and earlier this month it began testing pre-roll ads on creators' videos, with revenue shared with the creators.

The figures leave a lot unsaid. Shapero didn't say whether the 63% refers to the number of creator ads or the money spent on them, or give a starting figure. Members are not users: LinkedIn only publishes active-user numbers for the EU, as the Digital Services Act requires, and there they have run at 28% to 30% of members. On that basis, Social Media Today estimates around 420 million monthly active users worldwide, which is its estimate, not LinkedIn's.

LinkedIn doesn't give regional figures. For B2B brands in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the useful signal is the direction: LinkedIn is steering ad budgets towards video and creator-fronted formats, so campaigns built only on static sponsored posts are working against how the platform now wants to sell.