Tech News
A 25-year-old content creator turned a layoff into an opportunity. Now an influencer on LinkedIn, she says the platform can be more profitable than TikTok

- Valerie Chapman, a 25-year-old LinkedIn content creator, says the platform can be just as lucrative as TikTok—though many still see it as just “a place to apply for a job.” Influencers can build a personal brand, create digital products, and establish brand partnership.
Influencing is a crowded market, with millions of creators pushing products and collaborations across TikTok and Instagram. But they could be overlooking a platform that one influencer says is an untapped goldmine.
“For me, LinkedIn has just as good, if not better, of an infrastructure for creators to make money than TikTok,” Valerie Chapman, 25, a self-employed content creator and creative agency co-founder, tells Fortune.
Chapman, who had previously worked in advertising and content creation, says her LinkedIn career is why she no longer holds a corporate job. Two layoffs inspired her to pivot. And luckily, she brought some experience with her to the platform, as a previous social media management employer had asked her to become a LinkedIn thought leader in order to bring in sales. After she was let go in October 2023, LinkedIn influencing became her new hustle. She now has over 16,000 followers on the platform, with posts that reel in thousands of likes.
“We’re in the creator economy,” Chapman says, adding that people are using AI to help scale content to their individual communities. “None of that was on my radar until I got into the world of LinkedIn, and really started investigating how other solopreneurs were leveraging their personal brands and monetizing.”
While content creators can build their brand and following on any platform, Chapman says the professional social media platform is particularly rife with opportunity. Influencers who turn to it could score big bucks among a new niche audience—and more people are catching on, with LinkedIn even creating its own “Top Voices” category for the most influential creators on the platform.
“I would actually say LinkedIn is the most powerful in terms of monetizing your personal brand. No one’s talking about it in that way,” she says. “I just think that right now, so many people see LinkedIn as [just]…a place to apply to a job.”
LinkedIn is being overlooked—but it can be highly lucrative
Unlike TikTok, LinkedIn doesn’t pay creators for how much engagement they get on their posts. But there are other ways to cash in on the platform, Chapman explains.
“There’s no creator fund, but there’s other ways to monetize, like digital products, which I’m working on. Right now my primary income streams are brand partnerships, primarily with tech companies,” she says. “If you put on a sales hat, there’s tremendous amounts of opportunity on LinkedIn, especially because of the video feature that has just been incorporated in the last year or so.”
Chapman has developed a client roster by cold-calling brands to be incorporated into one of her LinkedIn videos—including her “Gen Z Woman in Business” series. She also says creators can build courses and other digital products—like business workshops or E-books on their area of expertise—that, once distributed, can bring in passive income.
And when clients do take interest, there’s an opportunity to set higher rates.
“You can actually charge more in brand partnerships on LinkedIn than other platforms, because your audience is a bunch of professionals—oftentimes CEOs and founders,” Chapman says. “So you can charge a premium for that kind of audience as well.”
After four months of hard work growing her presence online, LinkedIn noticed her, and invited to visit the company’s NYC office. She toured the office and had conversations with LinkedIn’s team on the future of work and digital influence. Receiving that recognition was a strong sign she should keep going.
Chapman says she’s since made significant headway as a creator who can now support herself, earning about $10,000 a month by dishing out advice and think pieces on personal brands and AI to her thousands of followers.
“I will say it took about three or four months to really build an infrastructure where the deals were coming in. It wasn’t like, ‘You got money right away,’” she says. “Once you start emailing people and you have an audience, then you can get to closing a brand partnership fairly easily, if you really dedicate your time to it.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tech News
Baidu releases reasoning AI model to take on DeepSeek

Baidu Inc. released a new artificial intelligence model that articulates its reasoning, in an apparent bid to regain momentum against up-and-coming rivals like DeepSeek.
The Ernie X1 model by China’s internet search leader works similarly to DeepSeek R1 — which shocked Silicon Valley by offering comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at a fraction of their development cost. Baidu’s reasoning model excels in areas like daily dialogs, complex calculations and logical deduction, it said in a statement Sunday.
Baidu also upgraded its flagship foundation model to Ernie 4.5. It immediately made all tiers of its service — including the X1 model — free for its chatbot users, several weeks than earlier previously planned.
The Beijing-based company was the first in China’s trillion-dollar tech sector to launch a chatbot modeled after OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but rival chatbots from ByteDance Ltd. and Moonshot AI soon took over in popularity. Open-sourced models like Alibaba’s Qwen and then DeepSeek gained greater recognition within the global developer community.
Ernie 4.5 outperforms OpenAI’s latest GPT 4.5 in text generation, Baidu said, citing several industry benchmarks.
Baidu has declared that it will make Ernie AI models open-source from June 30, representing a major strategic shift after the rise of DeepSeek. It also integrated the R1 model into its search engine — its bread-and-butter business.
The generative AI boom showed up in Baidu’s December-quarter results via a 26% jump in cloud revenue. That rise, driven by services provided to developers chasing computing power, was overshadowed by weak advertising sales amid China’s economic malaise.
Baidu concluded last month a drawn-out deal to acquire the YY Live streaming platform Joyy Inc. The $2.1 billion takeover released some $1.6 billion that Baidu previously deposited into escrow accounts, which it plans to invest into AI and cloud infrastructure.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tech News
China maps out plan to raise incomes and boost consumption

China will take steps to revive consumption by boosting people’s incomes, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday, citing a statement from the State Council.
Other measures include stabilizing the stock and real estate markets, and offering incentives to raise the country’s birth rate, as the government tries to ease the deflationary pressures afflicting the economy.
Beijing will promote “reasonable growth” in wages and establish a sound mechanism for adjusting the minimum wage, Xinhua reported. It will also look at setting up a childcare subsidy system, as well as strengthening how investment can support consumption.
Read More: Why China Is Struggling to Escape Cycle of Deflation: QuickTake
Invigorating consumption has been a challenge for the government since the end of the pandemic. Retail sales have been anemic while consumer prices fell into deflation in February for the first time in over a year.
At annual parliamentary meetings this month, the country’s leadership made boosting consumption their top priority for the first time since President Xi Jinping came to power over a decade ago.
Chinese stocks rallied the most in two months on Friday after the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced that officials from the finance ministry, the central bank and other government departments plan to hold a press conference Monday on measures to boost consumption.
Other highlights of the plan:
- Enlarge variety of bond-related products suitable for individual investors
- Adopt multiple measures to promote increase in farm incomes
- Raise financial help for some students
- Appropriately increase the basic pension for retirees
- Ensure timely and full distribution of unemployment benefits
- Support tourist attractions in expanding services and the reasonable extension of business hours
- Support opening of duty-free shops in cities where conditions permit
- Boost support for trade-in programs
- Lower the interest rate on housing provident fund loans at an appropriate time
- Scale back restrictions on consumption in an orderly manner
- Accelerate the development of new technologies and products such as smart wearables and autonomous driving
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
Tech News
New Prime Minister Mark Carney vows Canada will ‘never, ever’ be part of the US as he seeks alliances in Europe

New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is heading to Paris and London on Monday to seek alliances as he deals with U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada’s sovereignty and economy.
Carney is purposely making his first foreign trip to the capital cities of the two countries that shaped Canada’s early existence.
At his swearing-in ceremony on Friday, Carney noted the country was built on the bedrock of three peoples, French, English and Indigenous, and said Canada is fundamentally different from America and will “never, ever, in any way shape or form, be part of the United States.”
“The Trump factor is the reason for the trip. The Trump factor towers over everything else Carney must deal with,” said Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Carney, a former central banker who turned 60 on Sunday, will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday and later travel to London to sit down with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in an effort to diversify trade and perhaps coordinate a response to Trump’s tariffs.
He will also meet with King Charles III, the head of state in Canada. The trip to England is a bit a homecoming, as Carney is a former governor of the Bank of England, the first noncitizen to be named to the role in the bank’s 300-plus-year history.
Carney then travels to the edge of Canada’s Arctic to “reaffirm Canada’s Arctic security and sovereignty” before returning to Ottawa where he’s expected to call an election within days.
Carney has said he’s ready to meet with Trump if he shows respect for Canadian sovereignty. He said he doesn’t plan to visit Washington at the moment but hopes to have a phone call with the president soon.
Sweeping tariffs of 25% and Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have infuriated Canadians, and many are avoiding buying American goods when they can.
Carney’s government is reviewing the purchase of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets in light of Trump’s trade war.
The governing Liberal Party had appeared poised for a historic election defeat this year until Trump declared economic war and repeatedly has said Canada should become the 51st state. Now the party and its new leader could come out on top.
Robert Bothwell, a professor of Canadian history and international relations at the University of Toronto, said Carney is wise not to visit Trump.
“There’s no point in going to Washington,” Bothwell said. “As (former Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau’s treatment shows, all that results in is a crude attempt by Trump to humiliate his guests. Nor can you have a rational conversation with someone who simply sits there and repeats disproven lies.”
Bothwell said that Trump demands respect, “but it’s often a one-way street, asking others to set aside their self-respect to bend to his will.”
Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, said it is absolutely essential that Canada diversify trade amidst the ongoing trade war with the United States. More than 75% of Canada’s exports go to the U.S.
Béland said Arctic sovereignty is also a key issue for Canada.
“President Trump’s aggressive talk about both Canada and Greenland and the apparent rapprochement between Russia, a strong Arctic power, and the United States under Trump have increased anxieties about our control over this remote yet highly strategic region,” Béland said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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