LinkedIn Ads Are No Longer Worth It—Here’s Why I Pulled the Plug

Just stopped all LinkedIn ads last night until further notice.

I planned to wait out the Black Friday weekend and keep going until the end of the year, but performance remained just as subpar. ⤵️

While organic reach started to disappear quickly 2 years ago, with more ongoing cuts every couple of months, I shifted some spend to thought leadership ads throughout 2024 and 2025.

But ads were underperforming, too. As the network’s viability went down, reach from real users decreased as well. Extremely high CPMs for impressions that weren’t happening.

➡️ We ran these in parallel with job ads. Terrible performance as well. I can teach an entire course on how bad both the UX and performance is.

TL ads are not a terrible idea per se, but even at $5K/mo budget, they deliver nothing. So budget for $50K+ monthly to get some proper awareness. If that’s not budget-friendly, it’s probably a poor investment in the first place.

And the thing is, $5K/mo can get you a new hire or a fractional person or sponsoring a newsletter/podcast every month. It’s about the alternatives as you keep scaling up, especially as results simply don’t follow.

👉 The peak of social media was in 2022.

Especially for business purposes.

LinkedIn has not improved a single thing since 2023 either (name one new feature or UI update in the past 2 years).

Treating it as any other free product should be the norm in this case, instead of fueling an engine that worked in 2017-2022, but no longer does.