Websites are dead ... long live the website!

Social media platforms are convenient

It's easy to communicate a narrative to the world on today's web because social media platforms make it extremely easy to disperse your thoughts and ideas with the click of a button. Before the popularity of these platforms, the web or digital media was more of a gated community where only those with the technical chops or available resources could string together the pieces required to build and publish content via digital media to the world.

Social media platforms are constantly evolving. The technology and businesses that drive these platforms are always looking at ways to keep us engaged and persuade us to give up some pieces of our lives to feed their ever-hungry need to consume and process our data. It is done via attention-grabbing feeds, which present us with images, videos, sound and public discussion around topics that play to our emotions and desires.

Social media platforms make it easy for us to observe from a distance, and to feel as though we are not contributing to the chaos of the feed as observers. But we are contributing to the living feed, we are actively providing these platforms with our viewing habits, likes and dislikes, by indicating what we want to engage with via hearts and emojis or leaving comments or starting topics for discussion. For the content creators of today, these platforms provide the tools that make it easy to disseminate various forms of data to the public.

The idea of a mutually beneficial relationship with these platforms is questionable, all of us gain some form of gratification from observing or creating on these platforms. In some cases, entire livelihoods and industries have been spawned. But what is the real cost and value of what we inject into these platforms and in the long run, after we've handed over our data, how does this still benefit us after we're gone and these platforms live on? What will these platforms do with it?

Data is the new gold

Our data is a commodity, being traded for a service provided by these platforms that we deem "valuable". Maybe it is time for us to take a step back and especially for today's content creators, think about how we control this commodity.

In any endeavour, engagement, interaction or activity, there are inputs and outputs, risks vs rewards, when we do something, what is the desired outcome, how do we affect the things and people around us. When we upload an image of some past memory or take a birthday photo and then submit our data to social media platforms, we are taking our time and energy to produce something; the value of the thing and the reward we gain is debatable but one thing is for certain — the game is setup so that the owners of these platforms, gain a lot more than we do. Inherently this makes sense, because at the end of the day, these are businesses aiming to scale their growth and profitablity.

Building an ecosystem

With not knowing what the true cost or value of our data is to these businesses, doesn't it make more sense then for us to have tighter controls on our data? In the case of content creators, isn't it better then to take the time and effort to build one's own ecosystem? An ecosystem may simply start with owning your own website and leveraging that as the central node of your ecosystem with which you may use to disseminate information.

Long live the website!

Owning your website means monetizing your data on your own terms. Of course building an entire ecosystem is by no means an easy thing, but it is certainly easier in today's world to architect some of the fundamental pieces necessary for this. The hard and riskier part in my opinion, really boils down to how you build your audience, after all as a content creator these social media platforms, among many things sell you on the idea of a built in audience. But the thing is, you do need to build this audience regardless, so why not start with your own website and ecosystem and then use these platforms as extensions of that. They should be treated as another communication channel.

I may be naive in downplaying the technical aspects of architecting a website, as I have the knowledge and experience to do so, but there are tools and platforms that exist today, which at least minimize some of the difficulties related to this.

This is an ongoing topic, but the key takeaway, mostly for the content creator is to take a step back and think about the cost and value of your data. For the majority of us who observe and consume ot hese platforms, your data is exchanged for a service, which you may already be ok with, which is fine, but I implore everyone to have more awareness of what we are exchanging and what these businesses can do with said data.