The Monetization of Spam

I’ve been experimenting with a lot more platforms lately. For years, YouTube was the sole place where I published content, with the occasional newsletter thrown in from time to time. When I say YouTube, I mean long form video, and the vast majority of those were tutorials.

One of the things I’ve noticed about myself over the years is that I’ve never really been loyal to a specific medium. I do like video and I enjoy editing, but what I’ve always found more interesting is just finding new and unique ways to provide value, share what I know, or bring people along while I’m learning something new.

That mindset has led me to change up my publishing strategy quite a bit from the YouTube-only days. Now I publish almost daily short form content across LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, Instagram Reels, and X. It’s been interesting. Part of it I like, part of it I don’t. But the part I do like is how it forces me to stretch. I used to create videos that were anywhere from seven to fifteen minutes, where I could deep dive into a particular topic. Now I have to compress my ideas into one to two minute segments.

I’ve heard people say that short form content is bad, that it’s "brain rot" or whatever. I mostly disagree. I don’t think shortening a video from ten minutes to two minutes has any negative impact on somebody. The issue isn’t the length of the video. The issue is being on there all day. And the same applies to YouTube.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here.

Something I Noticed About LinkedIn

What I wanted to talk about is something I discovered that I think is a good lesson for anyone building a business, working as an independent professional, or creating content.

Here’s a little context first. I’m fairly unique in the sense that I consume almost zero short form video content. When I was making a lot more long form YouTube content, I would pretty regularly watch YouTube videos. But when it comes to TikTok and Instagram Reels, I consume little to none. I’m doing this on purpose. Instead of following trends and trying to replicate what other people are making, I’d rather be a little more of a trailblazer. I want to create content that I think people will find useful, or things that I personally find interesting, and maybe by extension others will feel the same.

I’m not spending a lot of time consuming content on these platforms, but I do pop in from time to time to read comments and reply when I can. One of those platforms is LinkedIn.

How Platforms Monetize Attention

One of the things I find fascinating about all these different platforms is the way they monetize. Generally speaking, if you want to monetize a content platform, you’re trying to pay for attention. You’re paying to get your content, product, or service in front of more people than you would organically. Sometimes you have organic content that performs really well and you want to boost it to reach even more people. A lot of people have found value in that approach.

I personally haven’t paid at all to advertise or boost any of my content. I’m just curious to see what performs organically.

This leads me into my larger point about LinkedIn.

You can pay TikTok to boost a post. You can pay X to run a post as an ad that gets distributed more widely. That’s pretty normal. That’s what most of these platforms do, and it’s why you probably see a decent number of ads when you use them.

But something I’ve found particularly fascinating, and something I think is a good lesson on what not to do, is what LinkedIn does with sponsored direct messages.

“Sponsored” Messages in Your Inbox

I was absolutely bewildered the first time I saw this, because it is so contrary to what good usability and good design looks like.

For those who don’t spend much time on LinkedIn (and I’m right there with you), here’s how it works. Somewhere on your screen, usually in the bottom right on desktop, there’s a little tab for your messages. You click it and it pops open showing a compact list of faces, names, and short intros. Not too unlike an email inbox, except there’s really no way to organize it. It’s just a list.

But up at the top, every so often, you’ll see a "sponsored" message. This is from a person or business selling you a product or service, placed directly in your inbox.

These messages come from someone who you do not know, who is not even connected with you, and who could quite possibly not even be a real person. And these are being sponsored by and placed there by the platform itself.

The Gmail Thought Experiment

For the sake of comparison, just imagine if you were using Gmail, and Gmail was allowing companies to pay money in order to show up at the top of your inbox with sponsored content selling products or services. How happy would you be with Gmail if they did that? It would be national news.

A lot of us, especially those of us who are running businesses or working as independent creators, our lines of communication can very quickly get filled with spam. But here’s the thing: LinkedIn isn’t just opening up another advertising placement. What they’re essentially saying is that this tiny little inbox that you’re using for a particular purpose is something they’re going to sell access to. That is a fundamental transformation of what we typically know our DMs or our email inboxes to be.

Think of another example. If you’re an iPhone user, think about your Messages app. Imagine one day if Apple sold businesses the ability to text you about their product or service. What would you think of that company? And far more importantly, what would you think of Apple? Nobody would like that. We have a word for this. It’s called spam.

The Real Problem

Out of all the social networks I’ve experimented with, they all have their quirks. They’re all trying to monetize attention. But I haven’t really seen anybody touch on how unbelievably invasive and disrespectful it is to sell access to somebody’s direct messages with completely irrelevant spam. LinkedIn is a company that exists on this earth that has legitimized spam as part of its business model.

It might sound like I’m being dramatic, but when it comes to somebody’s time and their inbox and who they want to communicate with, there are certain things you shouldn’t be able to pay your way into. You shouldn’t be able to pay your way into somebody’s inbox.

And what’s worse is that if you hover over one of these messages and click the three-dot menu, it gives you the option to delete the message, but you can’t block them. You cannot refuse to receive sponsored messages in your inbox. I’m sure if you pay LinkedIn, you probably can. But that’s exactly the issue. Just because you’re using somebody’s platform doesn’t mean that platform has the right to make your user experience worse. I guess they technically can, but they shouldn’t expect people to keep using it the same way.

The Takeaway

First off, LinkedIn is terrible. I think most people agree with that.

But second, and more importantly, it’s a good example for anyone who is starting to receive attention on an app they’ve built, a SaaS product, a website, or anything else they’re making. Take LinkedIn as a cautionary tale: just because you can monetize something, doesn’t mean you should.