Shifting Perspectives: Why You Should Become an Internet Landlord

This has been an idea that's been floating around my head for more than a couple of years now. More often than not, our presence on social media is centralized on a handful of platforms. That has inherent advantages and disadvantages. You have incredible reach, but your presence is bound to the rules of that social media platform.

Moving into 2024, I think it's high time to start reconsidering our options. Whether or not you love him or hate him, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter shows us that these platforms can change on a dime. Putting all of your eggs into even a couple of these social media baskets isn't good enough for your internet economic diversity.

So I am going to make a bold statement:

Hedge your bets, and become an Internet Landlord.

I want to make sure to say that I did not come up with this term. I originally heard this from YouTuber Luke Smith, a GNU Linux / Open Source enthusiast.

"…the problem with the internet is that people nowadays, there is too many internet peasants and not enough internet landlords. It is so easy to be an internet landlord, to have your own domain…

• Luke Smith - Get a Website Now! Don't be a Web Peasant!

These are borderline salacious statements. What I am saying is you should buy yourself a domain name, stand up a website, and build out your platform there. This sounds hypocritical because I am writing this on Medium, but this will also exist on my website as well.

Nothing is Forever

I have already brought up Elon Musk because of how often he has been showing up in the news cycle for the last couple of years. But the real place where my skepticism comes from is YouTube.

I will be the first to say, I love YouTube. I have been watching YouTube videos since the beginning of its launch. But because I have such a long history of being on the platform, I know a lot of the changes it had over the decade and a half it has been around.

I remember the period when YouTube went "family-friendly" where they regulated content that used swear words or projected obscenities in the video. There was a period where there was Fair Use and music used in video debates. If your video had music that was copyrighted, the video would stay up, but all of the audio would get muted. I also know there was a period when YouTube had harsher strikes and flags on content creators. If they got three flags, their entire channel got shut down, and needed to fight to get it back.

All of these instances could result in significant disruptions to the way you monetize your platform. One policy change can make your channel go from highly successful to being knee-capped in an instant.

The reason I care about this is because I have seen this so many times over the last decade. I have seen these types of videos ad-nauseam:

"If this policy goes through, then my ability to make content will be affected."

"If I get one more flag due to brigading, this channel will be shut down."

"These changes to ad revenue are going to result in thousands of dollars lost."

It just does not make sense to give this much power to the social media overlords. 

And it is not just YouTube. This applies to any social media platform. You and I have heard the same stories when it comes to content creators on social media. It all starts with somebody randomly getting their neck snapped by x-y-z reason, and their livelihood is completely ruined.

Tactics must change.

I believe that if you are creating something that requires internet traffic for growth, it needs to be built on solid ground. The biggest advantage that these social media companies offer is extremely fast growth from organic traffic. But when the time hits when critical success happens, you become quickly beholden to them.

Take a moment to reconsider your usage of social media platforms.

Build Your Brand The Hard Way

As I have said previously, becoming an Internet Landlord entails buying a domain name and creating an independent website to post your content. There is no doubt in my mind that it is way harder to do it this way. I have taken stock of what I need to do to grow my website and brand, and this is probably the slowest way to gain internet traffic. But doing it this way will have certain advantages.

The first is more like a prediction. I am hoping that building this out means I will have a "stickiness" to the level of traffic I get. When you come to my website, I know you are coming to read my content and my content alone. It is the difference between shopping in a mall versus a retail store. 

Social media is like mall shopping, you can easily bunny-hop from store to store. A retail store plants a visitor's feet at your location. Moving off of it takes just a bit more effort than social media platform browsing.

As we all know, it is always a game of inches.

The second advantage is I get full autonomy on how to build out my website. I can structure everything exactly to my liking. My skill level and knowledge are the only limitations I have.

Places like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest will force you to build content that conforms to their standards. On my website, on the other hand, the sky is the limit to what I want to do. You cannot beat that level of freedom.

The last advantage is specific to my skill set. I am a software developer by trade. That, in itself, gives me enormous advantages when it comes to building out my website. My website isn't built using WordPress, Squarespace, or the other competitors. I built it myself using commonly used commonly used front-end frameworks. That is a canvas I can adjust on demand.

The reason why this is important is even in my circumstances, I can be slightly beholden to the places that host my website. If they change their pricing or monetizing policies, it could dramatically affect the performance level of my website.

Because I built all of this myself, if I have to, I can host it on a tiny form factor server from my home. The thing that sucks there is that I would have to think about networking, security, and setting up an email server. But if the online environment shifts considerably in the next couple of years, I am well-protected to keep my brand and content creation going.

The best part is if I blow this up in the next couple of months, I can monetize my blog with Mediavine. That is when the stable income starts coming in.

Having said all of this, it is not for the faint of heart. The time it takes to organize and get everything going is painstakingly slow. It would be so much easier to just churn out articles on Medium and have everything taken care of for me.

But I am not doing all of this because it is easy. If I want an online presence, I want to do this smart. And I want to have some extra insurance.

What I Am Doing

This last week, I deployed Blue Howl Enterprises to production and it is available for the public. This website is built using NextJs, Tailwind, and Markdown. Cross-posting between Medium and my website only takes a couple of minutes and with a click of a button, the same article exists in two different arenas.

I am using Adobe Express as my graphic design tool to create images to help draw people in. I have also started up the social media aggregator Tailwind to help schedule and organize what I send out there. It's been a long time since I've used social media, so if it looks like a duckling trying to walk, then that's probably an accurate way of looking at my feed.

I will be the first to tell you, this is hard. Having a full-time job means that the couple of hours a day I have to work on this side business means that every minute is extremely expensive. I already had instances where I spun my wheels trying to get something working, and you burn nights trying to solve a problem rather than posting new content.

Because of how I am going about things, growing my online persona is going to be slow. I have to split my traffic between two avenues for the same content. I could be more agile if I would just stick to Medium.

But I have to be vigilant. I believe this is worth it. Building my brand is going to take more effort than most. I am willing to put in the work and I already have articles sketched out for the future.

If want to anchor your online presence with some real teeth, get yourself a domain name, and build out a website. 

Then claim your title as an Internet Landlord.