Meta’s deci­sion to end their part­ner­ships with fact check­ing orga­ni­za­tions set off a firestorm online this week. Apart from the expect­ed and under­stand­able frus­tra­tion with Mark Zucker­berg and the role mis­in­for­ma­tion on his plat­forms play in shap­ing pub­lic opin­ion, there’s been the usu­al wave of peo­ple look­ing for alter­na­tives to social. This man­i­fests as a famil­iar refrain to revive blogs and the web we lost.

It’s not going to happen.

Set aside the fact that I’ve cho­sen to blog about this: in a world with­out an acces­si­ble RSS read­er, we lack two things: an effec­tive dis­tri­b­u­tion mech­a­nism AND the habit­u­at­ed web brows­ing that was com­mon­place before the social media rev­o­lu­tion. Real­i­ty is that dis­tri­b­u­tion has always been paid, going back to Sears and Roe­buck mail­ing cat­a­logs across the coun­try. It’s what’s sus­tained ad-sup­port­ed media. Paid dis­tri­b­u­tion has been an effec­tive short­cut to growth for­ev­er and it con­tin­ues to win over owned channels.

Think of the pend­ing Tik­Tok ban, or any­time Insta­gram crash­es. Every­one screams, “this is why you need to own your chan­nels so you can own your audi­ence.” It’s exhaust­ing because no one invests in owned chan­nels mean­ing­ful­ly, or has­n’t in some time, and the peo­ple say­ing this know it. And where are they shout­ing this? On the very social media they’re decry­ing! Why? Because it’s where the audi­ence is!

Imag­ine what would hap­pen if the bud­gets that have been ded­i­cat­ed to pro­duc­tion and media for social chan­nels shift­ed to web­sites and newslet­ters! As some­one who came up in the first wave of cor­po­rate blogs, it’s easy to for­get how gen­uine­ly cre­ative those sites and expe­ri­ences were. There’s a rea­son waves of jour­nal­ists were hired by brands to lead edi­to­r­i­al — they need­ed fan­tas­tic con­tent to con­vince peo­ple to vis­it repeat­ed­ly. I still have close friend­ships with folks who ran sites like Coke Jour­ney and oth­ers. They were fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments in what was pos­si­ble with online chan­nels. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, they’re all gone now.

It’s not because I don’t enjoy mem­o­ries of that time, but it’s fool­ish to think it’s any­thing more than nos­tal­gia now. Being added to a blogroll was the orig­i­nal Team Fol­low­back. It was thrilling to join com­mu­ni­ties of like-mind­ed cul­tur­al crit­ics back then, but that quick­ly gave way to exact­ly the kind of paraso­cial rela­tion­ships we expe­ri­ence on social today.

So what can we do about it?

For my part, I strong­ly rec­om­mend invest­ing in owned con­tent and chan­nels to my clients for all the rea­sons enu­mer­at­ed above. Every­thing starts with con­tent. Always has. Where we’ve lost sight of things as com­mu­ni­ca­tors and mar­keters is believ­ing we have a turnkey solu­tion to suc­cess. It’s not as sim­ple as push­ing cam­paigns out their door like they’re on a con­vey­or belt and expect any­one to care.

Take it from me: bad con­tent, even with tremen­dous paid spend against it, does­n’t help you achieve your goals. There’s sim­ply too much of it for any­one to pay atten­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, you need to have a pro­found under­stand­ing of your audi­ence and what it takes not just to reach them, but engage them in ways that are measurable.

Don’t feel defeat­ed. Take it as a chal­lenge, first to your­self and then to the online com­mu­ni­ty you hope to build. Start small. Do some­thing every day, or as often as you can, whether that’s writ­ing some­thing, or cre­at­ing visu­als that need a home on the inter­net. You can still build audi­ences for con­tent if you have a strong point of view. Most impor­tant­ly, believe it yourself.