LinkedIn's Leaked Roadmap Is a Direct Bet Against Substack and Patreon

Picture a consultant who has spent three years posting on LinkedIn, earning a following of procurement managers and supply chain directors. No algorithm-chasing, no dancing, just sharp professional takes that land with exactly the right people. Until now, turning that niche audience into direct revenue meant leaving LinkedIn entirely and hoping followers would migrate to Substack or Patreon. If LinkedIn's internal plans become reality, that exit ramp may soon be unnecessary.

What the Leaked Documents Actually Say Business Insider reporters Alex Bitter

and Dan Whateley obtained internal LinkedIn documents outlining a significant expansion of the platform's creator infrastructure. According to Business Insider's reporting on the leaked roadmap, LinkedIn is developing paid creator subscriptions alongside a feature called "experiences," described in the documents as a mechanism for one-time purchases, such as paid advice sessions with a creator directly on the platform. These are not vague aspirations buried in a product brief; they are named features on an internal roadmap, which means engineering teams are already building toward them. For professional creators who have treated LinkedIn primarily as a discovery layer and monetized elsewhere, this is the clearest signal yet that the platform wants to be the whole stack. The strategic significance is hard to overstate. Substack built its business on the premise that professional writers and experts needed an independent home for paid newsletters. Patreon made a similar bet for creators who wanted recurring revenue from dedicated followers. LinkedIn is now signaling it wants to compete on that same monetization layer, with one structural advantage its competitors cannot replicate: it already has the professional audience, the job titles, the company affiliations, and the verified career context baked in by default.

The Creator Marketplace Is Already Live While

the subscriptions feature remains in the roadmap phase, LinkedIn has already taken a concrete step in its creator infrastructure push. As Digiday reported, LinkedIn has launched its first creator marketplace, designed to make it easier for marketers to discover and connect with creators directly on the platform. The marketplace allows marketers to search for relevant creators by topic and view creator cards showing relevant profile information, bringing LinkedIn closer to what TikTok's Creator Marketplace has offered in the consumer space for years. Digiday framed the move as LinkedIn making "a late but logical move to own B2B creator infrastructure before someone else does," and that framing is worth sitting with. The marketplace launch follows earlier LinkedIn products including BrandLink, TopVoice360, and Advice Sessions, according to Digiday, each of which nudged the platform incrementally toward creator infrastructure without fully committing to it. The new marketplace is the most direct version of that commitment yet. As Tom Sandford noted in a LinkedIn post on the launch, the platform is building infrastructure to support founders and professionals as creators, recognizing that people buy from people rather than from corporate pages. The marketplace is the B2B answer to a question the creator economy has been asking for years: where do professional creators go to get paid for their expertise at scale?

What This Means for Professional Creators For

creators already active on LinkedIn, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the platform is investing in tools that could eventually let you earn directly from your existing audience without redirecting them elsewhere. Paid subscriptions would mean recurring revenue from followers who already trust your professional judgment. The "experiences" feature, as described in the Business Insider reporting on the leaked roadmap, points toward paid one-on-one or small-group interactions, the kind of high-value, low-volume revenue model that consultants and educators often pursue through third-party booking tools today. None of this is guaranteed to ship on any particular timeline, and LinkedIn has a platform-sized track record of announcing features that arrive slowly or evolve significantly before launch. The creator marketplace is live and verifiable; the subscriptions and experiences features are roadmap items, not product releases. That distinction matters for anyone making decisions about where to invest their time and effort today. TargetMarket has tracked the broader rise of LinkedIn creators as a trend with real momentum behind it, and the platform's infrastructure moves are a response to that momentum rather than a driver of it.

The Bigger Picture: Platform Monetization

as the New Battleground Writing at Posting Nexus, Julia Alexander has documented how attention is consolidating onto fewer platforms, with session-time optimization increasingly working against creators who depend on audiences following them off-platform. That dynamic is exactly the problem LinkedIn's monetization roadmap is designed to solve, at least for professional creators. If you can earn directly on the platform where your audience already lives, the fragmentation problem shrinks considerably. What to watch next: whether LinkedIn's subscription and experiences features ship with competitive revenue splits for creators, or whether the platform takes a cut that makes the Substack and Patreon alternatives look attractive again. The leaked roadmap tells us LinkedIn wants to be in this business. The terms it offers creators will tell us whether it actually understands what being in this business requires. Creators who are building professional audiences on LinkedIn right now are in the most interesting position: the infrastructure is being built around them, and the choices they make about where to monetize in the next 12 to 18 months will be shaped by how well LinkedIn follows through.