A client emailed me at six in the morning last Thursday with a subject line that just said "is this going to happen here." No greeting, no body copy. She had woken up to the news that Facebook had switched off news across Australia overnight, and somewhere in the reading she noticed that state health departments, a fire service, and a couple of domestic violence charities had gone dark along with the publishers.
The fight was over the News Media Bargaining Code, a law that would have made Facebook pay publishers for the links. Rather than pay, Facebook removed the category. About a week later most of it came back, alongside a negotiated softening of the law, and the coverage moved on.
My client does not publish news. She sells kitchenware. She was right to be frightened anyway.
You do not own an audience you reach through somebody else's pipe, you rent access to it, monthly, on terms the landlord can rewrite while you sleep.
We have known this for a decade and kept not acting on it. Rented reach stays cheaper than owned reach right up until the morning it is worth nothing. Every organic reach collapse since 2012 taught the same lesson and our industry filed it as a pricing update instead of a warning. Australia was different only because it was not a slow squeeze. It was a switch, thrown by one company, in one afternoon.
So, the practical version. One, know your ratio. What share of your traffic, your revenue, and your actual customer relationships arrives through a channel you cannot control? Write the number down. If you cannot produce the number, that is the finding. Two, build the owned thing before the week you need it. An email list, a real one, people who chose it. Patagonia can talk to its customers tomorrow morning without asking anyone for permission. Three, stop counting followers as an asset. A follower is a lead you handed to a company that competes with you for it.
Here is the part that gets lost in the outrage cycle. Facebook did not behave out of character. It behaved exactly like the owner of infrastructure defending the terms of ownership, which is what it has always been and never once claimed otherwise in a contract. The error was ours, for spending nine years describing that infrastructure as our community.
A follower is a lead you handed to a company that competes with you for it.
I wrote back to my client with three lines and one question about her email list, which she has not sent to since November. We are fixing that in March. Barnaby supervised the entire exchange from the corner of the desk, unmoved, as he is by everything on this earth except the sound of the treat drawer opening.