The LinkedIn link counting API (/ countserv / count / share) always returns "0",

Question

It is easy to see the result in JSON:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=https://www.linkedin.com

Currently returning:

IN.Tags.Share.handleCount( { "count":0, "fCnt":"0", "fCntPlusOne":"1", "url":"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com" }); 

This seems to affect most LinkedIn Share buttons / counters on the Internet, including WordPress and other blogs. It has been “broken” since the end of last week (January 13, 2018).

I opened a ticket with LinkedIn support. The answer was supposed to be posted here, as support for LinkedIn developers is supported here. I hope for an answer that says, “Oh, we’ll fix it.” Or, if deliberately crippled, an ad that says so. (Twitter took a similar step a few years ago. It was unpopular among developers, but we have moved on.)

Answer 1

The share counting service is working again, working as before. The disconnection was intentional (apparently), but temporary.

As far as I know, this is an undocumented API, but it is integrated with the LinkedIn Share buttons that are used in countless websites or blogs around the world. Thus, LinkedIn does not have a contract / obligation to maintain this service ... therefore consumers of the service in components other than LinkedIn should be careful.

Answer 2

In addition to Chris Hemidinger's answer, this feature is now completely deprecated

Obsolete inShare counter

As you can see, they rejected this statement:

Own account does not fully reflect the influence that part of the content provides, and we encourage publishers and other content creators to use the inShare plugin as a way to talk and interact with LinkedIn members.

Then they refer to the Documentation :

Share on the LinkedIn plugin will no longer return an account.

This is very inconvenient for my company, since we just finished creating a set of tools based on this.

Answer 3

Thanks for the update! It was pretty annoying to keep track of this. I had to research the code, request from the API itself with several URLs, sent a ticket to LinkedIn ... and ended up finding myself here and reading this. I believe that it would be better to return some kind of error code than 0. Many people actually display the number of their sites.