Twelve years ago, I argued that your website was your digital home. You could run around naked if you wished. Your home, your rules.
Social platforms offered rented accommodation. The landlord made the rules and could change them without asking you. However, it was not clear to me then that it would become an existential distinction.
The traffic coming from these sites was never ‘yours’. It was borrowed from the platforms and subject to their rules, algorithms, and monetisation strategies. The landlord has struck and imposed a pile of new requirements and limitations on your rented digital channel access.
The emergence of AI has been the pivot point.
Search is no longer an appropriate term. It implies looking in several places, considering options, enabling you to make informed choices. The overviews now being delivered give what the platform regards as the default best answer, above any alternative potential source.
Most of us take that answer for granted and look no further, most of the time. Google, and increasingly all platforms, are providing disincentives to leave their ecosystem, while promising incentives by way of algorithmic distribution to stay.
As a result, traffic to websites via digital platforms has crashed.
In the case of the modest StrategyAudit blog, the traffic referred by Google and LinkedIn, the major channels I used has eroded by around 80% over the last 3 years, accelerating noticeably in late 2024 when Google rolled out overviews to Australia.
LinkedIn has progressively rewarded content that keeps users inside LinkedIn and restricted the reach of posts that send them elsewhere. This week saw another turn of the screw. The garden wall had grown higher again. I received a note from Microsoft telling me that Publisher will be removed from the Microsoft 365 subscription from October 1. The opening sentence of the email is ‘Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription’
How removing something I have paid for and is of value to me is an improvement in the absence of a price reduction is beyond my simple understanding. It does however make the point that the landlord can do whatever they like and you have no redress. They very kindly gave me list of instructions about how best to preserve publisher files so I could use them again. This is a bit like the landlord putting on a sad face and giving you a list of alternative rented locations as they throw your furniture out onto the street.
We gave the digital landlords our attention, data, and content. In return, they gave us apparently free access. They have not broken that bargain so much as rewritten it, without negotiation.
For those like me who use the web as a creative outlet with no expectation of a financial return, the only impact such changes have is on my ego. So few people are reading and responding to my brain-farts. However, for someone who had built a business on rented digital space, it is a rapidly advancing disaster, as the foundations of their business model are being rapidly removed.
The only antidote is to build your own digital house and fill it with furniture valuable to those with whom you wish to interact, so they choose to visit. The platforms must become the paths that lead to your home, not the real estate upon which your home is built.
P.S. The link in the first sentence of this post sends me to ‘LinkedIn gaol’. You will be lucky to find this post on any platform. Subscription, which is absolutely free and will not solicit anything, is the only way to ensure you see future posts.
