Building on Digital Land: Is Your Content On Lease?

Are you publishing content on borrowed land?

If you’re a business or individual creator sharing content on social media platforms like Instagram, Medium, YouTube, HackerNoon (ironic, I know!), LinkedIn, or other third-party websites, then dear reader—you are publishing content on borrowed land.

This phenomenon is called Digital Sharecropping, and it’s keeping your content on lease.

What even is digital sharecropping?

Nicholas Carr coined the term “digital sharecropping” in 2006.

In his blog post, Carr talks about a new, unsettling phenomenon birthed by the Internet, and called it digital sharecropping:

“One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”

What did he mean?

When you publish valuable content on platforms like LinkedIn, who benefits the most? You or LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, of course. The value and engagement you’re building on the platform are making LinkedIn more valuable. And you might be the one doing all the work, but you don’t get to decide how the content is distributed. LinkedIn’s algorithm does.

If you remember, a couple decades down, LinkedIn was a place people logged in to look for jobs and logged out when they’d found one or got tired from all the searching.

LinkedIn, today, has grown from a mere social networking site for professionals to an indispensable platform for marketing, advertising, and brand building. A large chunk of that growth comes from its growing numbers of “creators” and relevance as the platform to demonstrate expertise beyond the job roles and employment history.

So much so that now, posting on LinkedIn is equated with personal branding – as I’ve touched upon before.

And just like in the old days of sharecropping: in the digital land owned by LinkedIn, you become a mere sharecropper.

This is why your content is on lease.

Do those who sow the land reap the rewards?

The old system of sharecropping wasn’t a fair practice. But the case with digital sharecropping isn’t as black and white.

“It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative.” writes Carr.

“To put it a different way, the sharecroppers [creators] operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers [platform owners] operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.”

While that stands true, there has been a sea of change since the early days of Web 2.0.

Digital sharecroppers of today are as interested in making money as they are in self-expression.

Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and others understand this, and let them monetize content through their respective creator’s program. That’s a huge incentive. And if you make it big enough, the sponsors roll in with the dollars.

The monetary equation is one reason driving the rapid rise of individual creators recently.

This, however, doesn’t change the fact that once you hit publish, the content effectively belongs to the platform. You still own the copyright to the content, but how it’s distributed and shown to the audience can change at any time.

YouTube can take down your videos for “violations” you didn’t know you committed. Instagram can restrict access to your account on arbitrary grounds.

One day, a country can decide to ban a particular social media website, like India did with TikTok, and you’re no longer a “TikToker”.

All that hard work can disappear overnight.

Does the same apply to businesses? We

Pretty much, but there are a few differences.

While social media and content syndication/blogging websites are a vital part of the marketing mix—their impact on local/small businesses is different from the bigger ones.

I was surprised to learn that nearly 80% of purchases that consumers made since 2019 were done after seeing online/social media Ads. This is huge for small businesses that depend on social channels to drive traffic and sales. This is keeping them afloat.

Plus—between Ads, influencer marketing, paid promotion, and organic engagement—there are a lot of options for businesses to explore in the social space.

The only problems I see are:

• Putting maximum effort into building higher engagement on social channels instead of building the credibility of their own website.
• Not directing the traffic earned on socials toward a digital space they own: Their own website!!!
• Not having a social media strategy or team to keep the profiles updated and engaging. With a proper system, they can create opportunities to attract and engage (potential) customers while collecting data on their preferences, dislikes, and behavior.

Remember, social media is a public platform where having a good presence (decent # of followers, engagement, and professional-looking creatives) equals a credible brand. At least in the eyes of the general public.

This, in effect, drives the business.

And what about the content consumers?

Between content creators and platforms, we often miss out on the most crucial part of the equation—content consumers.

If you think about it, we’re all just a fickle bunch, aren’t we?

Remember when Instagram and Facebook were down for like 0000.1 seconds? This was us.

When Instagram launched Threads, millions of us jumped the new hot thing in town, and now we’re already bored of it. The mass exodus of users after Musk took over Twitter? Your 1000 followers are now down to 920.

Someone asked on Quora: What would happen should all social media sites be shut down? The responses aptly summed up our collective fickle state of mind:

The land we’re building our brands and businesses on isn’t in our control. Some of these digital lands are being threatened (TikTok congressional hearing), some are losing relevance (X has been dying slowly) and others are grappling with technological disruptions (Google’s policy changes following AI-generated content).

Such changes are always happening, which is why we have people managing social media and strategizing content for our businesses. We always need human eyes to watch how algorithms are shapeshifting and find a way to navigate the ever-happening changes.

This is the dilemma with building on digital land.

And, the only logical solution is to own a piece of digital land with your own website and hosting while using *relevant* social media networks to distribute content, generate traffic, engage the audience, and show up where the customers are.