LinkedIn is preparing to move into events focused around content, as it tries to claim a larger share of the creator economy. According to company documents seen by Business Insider, the company has plans to launch events featuring creators in the second half of 2026, with a longer-term ambition to host as many as 4,000 creator events a year.

It plans to organise gated events with up to 50 creators in the second half of 2026, with paid events following later this year.

LinkedIn believes it’s missing out on valuable content because “creators prioritize platforms where they can monetize,” according to one of the documents seen by Business Insider. A spokesperson confirmed the company has begun testing paid events with creators, saying early pilot sessions with Cassie Kozyrkov, Codie Sanchez, Chris Do, and Lorraine Lee showed demand exists.

The creator economy, or direct-to-consumer content, involves a smorgasbord of social platforms, newsletters, podcasts, video channels, online courses, live streams, paid communities, and, as LinkedIn knows, virtual and physical events. Individuals build audiences and earn income from advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions, ticket sales, merchandising, and educational products.

If creators can turn the LinkedIn audience into paying customers, it could become more than a place to post professional updates or AI-generated, shameless self-aggrandisement.

Documents seen by Business Insider show that LinkedIn sees creator-led events as a sizeable market, and estimates paid virtual creator-led events could be worth as much as $5 billion this year. It sees a potential to grow the market to a value of $25 billion annually by the end of the decade.

LinkedIn’s current content strategy comprises largely of LinkedIn Learning, a subscription platform integrated with LinkedIn profiles, jobs, skills data, and enterprise training. It offers video-based tutorials and courses for business, technology, and creative fields. Its own LinkedIn Learning channel is a library of 13,000+ courses and hundreds of thousands of videos.

It’s envisaged that in the future, users would be able to buy access to events through one-time purchases, with subscriptions introduced at a later date, according to the documents. Subscriptions would give members access to a creator’s events and other content, making LinkedIn more like platforms such as Patreon, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify – companies identified as competitors by LinkedIn in the creator space.

LinkedIn’s possible advantage is its sheen of professional context. Depending on the creator, a career coach, founder, designer or analyst might find LinkedIn’s audience more commercially relevant than that of a mainstream platform, which are heavily focused on the consumer market and entertainment.

Becoming a provider of paid creator events would require LinkedIn to be able to oversee discovery, payments, creator incentivising, and quality control. Get these elements right, and with the right creators for the LinkedIn audience, it would produce a new line of revenue for the company and expand the potential number of audiences creators could reach.

The insights come at a time of internal cost-cutting. Business Insider reports that LinkedIn is to lay off an undisclosed number of employees, with CEO Daniel Shapero telling staff on Wednesday that investment would be cut in some areas of the business. Separately, in a memo also seen by BI, LinkedIn says it wants to feature instructors on its platform so it can “license and monetize […] teachings directly on LinkedIn.”

Creators work with a high degree of control over monetisation, and are free to move platform to get the best return from their work. LinkedIn’s bet is that professional expertise can be packaged into paid events and subscriptions, and that its audience will pay for access.

(Image source: Pixabay, under licence.)

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