☕️ LinkedIn wants to own B2B creator discovery

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In today's MarketingShot:

🤝 LinkedIn wants to own B2B creator discovery

📱 Instagram extends Your Algorithm to the main feed

🤖 AI 'girlfriend ads' fuel a new wave of MFA sites

📈 Organic traffic is now mobile advertising's biggest fraud blind spot

📌 Pinterest links Amazon Storefronts to creator profiles

💡 + 5 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 8 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 6 trending marketing tools

• LinkedIn has launched its first creator marketplace, a tool built to make B2B creator discovery easier and more scalable for marketers wanting to reach the platform's growing pool of creators across many niche areas of expertise.
• Marketers can search creators by topic and view cards showing followers, post volume and engagement, then click "creator insights" for impressions, a bio, and audience demographics by industry, job title and location, and contact creators directly.
• The marketplace is in alpha within LinkedIn's campaign manager, open to select brands and creators in North America for English content only, with creators opting in to share data and eligible ones gaining monetization tools.

• Instagram is giving users explicit topic-preference controls on the main feed through Your Algorithm, a change that reshapes organic reach and content targeting by letting people tell the system which topics they like and dislike.
• Users pick from a list Instagram first fills in based on their in-app activity, and any edits revise the algorithmic parameters assigned to each person, which marketers should track since it could shift content distribution.
• Instagram tested Your Algorithm for Reels in October 2025 and added it to the Explore feed in April, with the main feed now the third surface where users can adjust what they see.

• Made-for-advertising websites are drawing users with AI-generated "girlfriend ads" that promise virtual companionship, then funnel clicks toward paid search results and low-quality pages packed with ads from real brands, according to a DoubleVerify report.
• These MFA networks pulled in more than 2 million visits per month during the first quarter of 2026, and DoubleVerify estimated that a single network could make revenue in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
• Deepsee.io found the number of AI slop sites more than doubled over the past year, with its block list of MFA and AI slop domains rising to 243,853 in 2026, up from 108,270 in May 2025.

• AppsFlyer's State of Fraud for Marketers 2026 found that organic traffic now drives 52 per cent of all fraudulent mobile installs, making the channel advertisers treat as a clean baseline the largest single source of fake installs.
• The report drew on 106.4 billion installs across 246,000 apps, and showed that inflating the organic number shifts what counts as normal, so fraudulent paid installs blend in and look like they are just keeping pace with organic.
• In Finance, tighter affiliate controls cut that channel's fraud share from 58 to 49 per cent, but organic's share climbed from 35 to 46 per cent over the same period, with total fraud volume barely changing as it migrated.

• Pinterest has rolled out Amazon Storefront linking, a tool that connects creators' Amazon Storefronts to their Pinterest accounts and automatically applies affiliate attribution whenever they tag an eligible Amazon product.
• After a one-time setup, creators no longer copy and paste affiliate links for each product tag, and they can display their Amazon Storefront handle on their Pinterest profile so users browse a wider catalog of recommendations.
• Pinterest reports that more than 50% of its users come to shop and conduct over 80 billion searches each month, and the company said storefront linking will expand to other retail partners without naming them.

Strategies & Tactics

Other news & articles you might like

• Apple rewrites Applebot rules to feed Siri AI - what publishers must know LINK

• Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google LINK

• Only 12% of AI Search Suggestions Match Real User Queries, Study Finds LINK

• Everyone is fighting over the wrong part of agentic commerce LINK

• Instagram Opens Reels Post-View Ad Placement to All Advertisers LINK

• Canada joins global movement to ban social media for kids: ‘We are failing our children. Enough is enough’ LINK

• Lessons from the world’s most effective ad campaign LINK

• ChatGPT drops to 52.7% as Claude triples its AI traffic share LINK

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