So I assume a lot of people got the "Congratulations! You're profile is among the X% most viewed on LinkedIn  email. I got it earlier this week and my natural suspicion immediately clicked in. I don't trust any email that says "click here for more info" if I'm not ABSOLUTELY sure of it's provenance.

However a bit of judicious googling shows it to be genuine...but also no where near as "special" as LinkedIn would like me to believe.

They have 200 million users...so that X% (in my case X=10, where I know other people have had 5 or even 1) is still a pretty high number. It's obviously a marketing ploy (I'm avoiding using the word scam) as what they want you to do is sign up for a paid service so you can see details on all these lovely people viewing your profile.

It got me thinking of other stats about LinkedIn - for instance that 47.6% of users spend less than two hours a week on LinkedIn  or that 6% log in less than once a month. Strangely, I don't see LinkedIn sending me emails that say "12 million people hardly use our service at all".

The effect of the email has left me feeling a bit jaded, possibly even conned and generally not-special-at-all.