LinkedIn Newsletters are spam and a scam
Many people have been suggesting me to start a “LinkedIn Newsletter” for my space articles specifically because it will tap into my existing connections and their networks on the platform. After much reluctance against joining yet another siloed service, I thought perhaps it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot. You know, I’d at least get some more email subscribers in the worst case. And so I created one. As it turns out, LinkedIn Newsletters are terrible through and through.
The spam
First off, as soon as I made my first LinkedIn Newsletter post, LinkedIn automatically sent out an “invitation” to all my connections and followers to subscribe—without telling me it will do so in the way it did: with notifications that look like I specifically personally invited that person. Which I did not! This is especially bad for people who are already subscribed to my space blog since this must’ve felt like spam. If that was you, I’m sorry but I had zero control over if, when, and how I could send that entitled “invite”.
The scam
LinkedIn Newsletters do not meet the fundamental definition of a newsletter. You can’t export your subscriber emails to, say, import them to another platform if and when you want to move away your newsletter from LinkedIn for whatever reason. The whole point of having mailing lists for your work is that it’s a direct connection between you and your readers. It’s portable and platform-agnostic. But LinkedIn Newsletters are a scam because they aren’t even newsletters. To drive this point home, if you share your newsletter’s link outside of LinkedIn like a normal person, people cannot even subscribe to it via their email. They must log into or create a LinkedIn account.
What posting an article on your LinkedIn “Newsletter” thus really amount to is nothing more than a push notification for a new social media post. This trait of LinkedIn keeping you off your own email list—people who chose to connect with you—is just as bad as Instagram not allowing links in post descriptions. Links! The fundamental enabler of the Web! Email! The building block of a newsletter!
P.S. Yes, I know about paid tools that scrape LinkedIn to get you some of your subscriber emails. But they are shady, and can be a hit and a miss. More importantly though, you shouldn’t need to go through such hoops just to have something that should be standard.
The thankless
Just to reinforce the idea that LinkedIn Newsletters are intentionally built to be nothing but a lock-in feature, the description field of your “newsletter” can't even link to anywhere on the Web, such as your website for example. Thankless corporates, I tell you.
If you thought things couldn’t get worse further still, guess what? As far as I can tell, there’s no way to export your LinkedIn Newsletter articles and posts in any standard format of a blog or newsletter. Your posts too are stuck on LinkedIn, unless you fancy manually copy-pasting every article’s text and images onto another blog or newsletter.
If you enjoyed this rant, these posts might enthuse you too:
- What will it take for me to take LinkedIn seriously
- How LinkedIn treats us like monkeys
- How to have sustainable conferences
