You know, it wasn’t that long ago.

There was RSS.

There were blogs.

There were sub-groups and communities. The weirdos found each other. The non-weirdos found each other. It wasn’t perfect. But it was distributed. It was ours.

It was yours.

Now? The original dream of the web is dying. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work.

They control what gets amplified and what gets monetized. A few conference rooms in Silicon Valley dictate our online culture.

It’s time to take it back.

Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Be in charge of the relationship with your audience.

Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.

Always. Own. Your platform.

Do you see someone in the wild, not owning their platform? Let them know:

Copy

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A tiny, tiny, not-at-all-complete list of reasons you should own your platform:

• Mar. 2019 – “First an unsolicited email asking for license to my work, then Medium explaining that they can’t force you to do that.”
• Jan 2019 – Dig Inn leaves Grubhub
• Oct. 2018 – Facebook Risks Losing the Trust of Its Only Real Customers: Advertisers
• Aug. 2018 – ‘Work with Facebook or die’: Mark Zuckerberg
• Jan 2018 – Fred Wilson: “I would never outsource my content to a third party”
• Dec. 2017 – Everyone hates Patreon’s new fee
• Oct. 2017 – Buzzfeed’s Tasty has dropped from 74m FB interactions in May 2016 to 20m in September 2017
• Oct. 2017 – Snapchat is pushing its publisher content almost out of sight
• Sept. 2017 – Ev Williams Has Big Plans For Medium 3.0
• July 2017 – Paying To Promote News Stories On Facebook Is The Ad World’s Favorite New Tactic
• June 2017 – Media Companies Are Getting Sick of Facebook
• April 2017 – Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of our posts. And it’s getting worse
• April 2017 – Facebook’s Instant Articles promised to transform journalism — but now big publishers are fleeing
• Oct 2016 – How Facebook Extracts False Confessions From Publishers
• Sept. 2016 – Apple News Tweak Dings Publishers’ Websites
• June 2016 – Facebook adjusts News Feed to favor friends and family over publishers

This is a Sean Blanda creation on behalf of the internet. There are probably typos.