Someone posts their best work. Three days of editing, perfect lighting, their most vulnerable story yet. 127,000 followers. Six hours later: 47 likes. That same afternoon, some kid with 180 followers films himself eating cereal upside down. 2.3 million views overnight.
That’s the system doing exactly what it was built to do, and it’s cruel to the people it hurts most, the ones who did everything the gurus told them. They showed up every day, poured real work in, and trusted that the audience they built belonged to them.
Why is building an audience on social media harder now?
Building an audience you rent on someone else’s platform is career suicide.Share on X
Remember 2018? You posted a photo and your followers saw it. You shared a thought and your subscribers got notified, and real relationships grew your business. That was a brief moment when the platforms accidentally worked in creators’ favor. For the alternative, see how a book builds an audience you own and what makes a novel find its audience.
That window slammed shut. For six years, we’ve been sold the biggest lie in digital marketing: “Build your audience, and everything else follows.” Every guru, every course, every conference speaker pushed the same fairy tale while the platforms were busy installing slot machines where our timelines used to be.
The game changed. The creator economy was redesigned to extract value from creators, and I blame the gurus nearly as much as the platforms. The platforms never pretended to be on your side. The people selling audience-building courses kept selling them while the reach numbers fell, and their students paid for it in years of work.
The Numbers
Organic reach has collapsed across every major platform. According to Socialinsider’s data, Instagram posts now reach roughly 3.2% of a brand’s followers. Facebook is worse at 1.25%. Twitter sits around 3%. TikTok varies wildly but trends downward as the platform matures, with engagement rates dropping from 2.65% in 2023 to 2.50% in 2024.
Those blue numbers next to your name belong to the platform. They’re its user database, and you’re allowed to reach it when that happens to serve the company. Instagram’s explore page shows your followers to advertisers, and your creativity is the bait. I know a photographer with 2.1 million Instagram followers who can’t sell a $40 print. The platform shows his work to people browsing during lunch breaks instead of collectors looking to buy art. His massive following is optimized for engagement that makes money for Instagram and none for him.
The Content Vending Machine
The algorithm doesn’t want creators. It wants content vending machines that dispense dopamine hits on command. Post something genuine? Dead. Share a personal struggle? Crickets. Film yourself crying while explaining how trauma taught you to love yourself? Viral gold.
Facebook discovered that angry content gets more engagement than happy content. So they promote rage. Instagram learned that insecurity drives clicks. So they push comparison culture. TikTok found that controversy keeps users watching. So they amplify division.
Your thoughtful video about climate change gets 200 views. Some idiot arguing that birds aren’t real gets 50,000. The algorithm is working perfectly, and working perfectly means maximizing addiction and ad revenue. I don’t believe any platform that calls that a glitch.
What Is Digital Sharecropping?
The platforms have engineered digital sharecropping. You work their land, use their tools, follow their rules, and they take most of the value you create. The remainder keeps you just hungry enough to keep working.
The constant pressure to feed the algorithm is destroying creators.
Take a day off, lose reach for a week. For more on building a massive organic following, see Richard’s interview with Dan Shinder. Take a week off, start over completely. People who built six-figure followings over years watch those audiences evaporate after a single algorithm update because those audiences were never theirs to begin with.
Meanwhile, a jewelry maker with 140,000 Instagram followers pays the platform $200 a week to show her posts to the people who already chose to follow her. They’re literally charging her to access her own audience. Her email newsletter with 3,000 subscribers generates more sales than her entire Instagram presence. Because those 3,000 people wanted to hear from her.
I can’t think of a clearer example of who these platforms work for. She did the work of earning those followers, and the company turned her own audience into a product and sold it back to her by the week.
What Works for Audience Building Now?
Owning the channel. An email list, a website and a book don’t need an algorithm’s permission to reach people, and nobody can switch them off.
From the podcast
Jeri Seeley spent a career in hospitality and puts the relationship in terms no algorithm changes, on Leaders and Their Stories:
The customer isn’t always right, but they’re still your customer, and they’re still your number one. Without a customer you don’t have a job, you don’t have a business, you don’t have anything.An owned audience is the only version of that relationship a platform cannot revoke.
Stop trying to build an audience on platforms designed to prevent you from accessing that audience. Email newsletters outperform social media on every metric that matters. Every subscriber chose to give you direct access. No algorithm hides your emails. You own the contact list. Open rates average around 35%, according to Mailchimp, compared to single-digit organic reach on social platforms. Revenue per subscriber dwarfs anything social media delivers.
The book on this: Make a Living as a Self-Published Author is 302 pages on the business behind the book, the half of the job nobody warns a first-time author about.
Build an email list. Create content so valuable that people seek it out directly through search engines and recommendations. Focus on depth over reach. One hundred people who trust you enough to buy from you matter more than 100,000 who barely know you exist. I’d rather have a list of a few hundred readers who open every email than a six-figure following that one update can wipe out. The small list looks unimpressive the day you start it, and it’s still the only audience number nobody else controls. Treat social media like a highway billboard. Use it to drive traffic to places you control: your website, your newsletter, your community platform. Publish to your newsletter first, then repurpose for social. This way you benefit from any algorithmic tailwinds without being destroyed when conditions change.
| Factor | Rented platform audience | Owned channel (list, site, book) |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides reach | The algorithm, tuned for engagement and ad revenue | You; no algorithm hides your emails |
| Typical reach | Single-digit organic reach: Instagram roughly 3.2%, Facebook 1.25% | Email open rates average around 35%, per Mailchimp |
| Who owns the contacts | The platform; followers are its user database | You own the contact list |
| Access to your own audience | The platform can charge you to reach people who already follow you | Every subscriber chose to give you direct access |
| Risk of change | A day off costs a week of reach; one update can wipe an audience | Nobody can switch it off |
| Best use | A billboard that drives traffic elsewhere | Home base: publish to the newsletter first |
The Casino Is Rigged
The audience-building dream is dead. Killed by companies that realized they could make more money selling your creativity to advertisers than helping you build sustainable businesses.
I’d rather have a list of a few hundred readers who open every email than a six-figure following that one update can wipe out.
The creators who survive won’t be the ones with the most followers. They’ll be the ones who stopped caring about follower counts and started building real businesses with real customers who pay real money.
Every hour you spend optimizing for their algorithm is an hour not spent building something you own. Every post you craft for their engagement metrics is creative energy stolen from work that could pay your bills. Every follower you accumulate on their platform is a relationship you’re renting.
The house always wins, and I’m angry at how many good creators found that out after the audience was already gone. If you’re still pouring your best work into a platform that charges you to reach your own followers, start moving those readers somewhere you own this month, while the house still lets you talk to them.
My take
Followers on a platform are rented, and the landlord changes the terms whenever it likes. Somebody with 127,000 followers gets 47 likes, and that’s the system doing what it was designed to do. Stop treating the feed as your home. Use it as a billboard that points to your site and your newsletter. Publish to the newsletter first. Then move every reader you can reach to a place you own, this month, while the platform still lets you talk to them.
People Also Ask
Rented audiences vanish when the algorithm shifts. Sell Your Books covers marketing you control, including the email lists I built over more than a decade of selling my own books.
