Owned Platforms, Owned Results

In 2009, historian and archivist Jason Scott Sadofsky wrote,

“If you want to take advantage of the froth… then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties are cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.”

While the internet was a radically different place 16 years ago, it may surprise you to learn that the target of his ire was cloud platforms - something that, if not taken for granted today, are thought of as highly convenient.

He opined that, as you have no control over how cloud platforms operate, they could not be relied on, and that doing so was akin to throwing whatever you chose to store on them away. Everything meaningful that you’ve created, your photographs, your articles, your relationships, all gone if a service closes, and typically with no warning.

While he was referring to media platforms like YouTube, the same concept extends to social media platforms.

The modern internet - the consolidated internet - revolves around a relative handful of sites, with social media being front and centre. According to SEMRush’s Top Websites page, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were among the top ten most visited websites in the world in November 2024.

With over 24 trillion visits a month collectively, it’s clear that an overwhelming mass of people use and trust these platforms. For example, it’s not uncommon for a business to do their marketing exclusively from a Facebook Business page. Wouldn’t it make sense to be active where your audience most likely already is?

As with cloud platforms, though, you have no control. You can’t control how their algorithms work, and you can’t control the results those algorithms give you. Social media platforms are only concerned with keeping users as engaged as possible, for as long as possible, so they can continue serving them ads, and - since this model has proven to be financially lucrative for them - they have little incentive to change.

Being able to connect and having interesting conversations with customers and colleagues is still incredibly valuable, but you may want to temper your expectations about what you can achieve through social media. A post might become popular for reasons completely unrelated to your business, and generate no customers; your most valuable insights might never get the traction they deserve for reasons that are completely arbitrary.

When you play their game, you need to play by their rules, no matter how unfavourable those rules are.

But when you own the platform you publish to, you get to make your own rules.

Your material endures, for as long as you’d like it to.

You get more meaningful insight into how it performs.

You can easily share it with everyone.

You get to build a home.