BuzzFeed News shut down in 2023. Vice filed for bankruptcy. Dozens of digital-native media companies that were supposed to be the future of journalism have collapsed, downsized, or been absorbed into larger entities. The promised revolution didn’t happen. Instead, we got a masterclass in the dangers of platform dependency.

These companies built massive audiences and substantial businesses on platforms they didn’t control. Then the platforms changed the rules, and everything fell apart. It happened fast, it was predictable, and almost nobody learned from it.

The Facebook Years

Remember when Facebook was going to save journalism? Around 2014-2015, media companies discovered that Facebook could drive enormous traffic to their articles. More traffic than their own websites generated organically. More traffic than search engines provided. Facebook was a gift, and the smart play was to optimise everything for Facebook distribution.

BuzzFeed nailed this. They understood how content spread on social media. They created the listicle format, the personality quiz, the shareable video. They hired actual journalists to do real reporting, but packaged it for Facebook virality. It worked brilliantly. At their peak, BuzzFeed was getting hundreds of millions of monthly visitors.

Other companies followed. Vice, Mic, Refinery29, The Huffington Post. They all bet big on social distribution. They hired aggressively, expanded globally, and raised massive amounts of venture capital based on traffic growth.

Then Facebook changed the algorithm.

The Algorithm Changed Everything

In 2018, Facebook announced it would prioritise content from friends and family over content from publishers. This wasn’t a tweak—it was a fundamental shift. Overnight, media companies saw their Facebook traffic drop 50%, 60%, 70%.

The justification was that the platform had become too commercial, too newsy, less about connecting people. They were fixing the user experience. But the effect was to destroy the business model of companies that had built everything around Facebook distribution.

Some tried to adapt. They pivoted to video—another platform priority. Facebook was promoting video, paying publishers to create video content, promising it was the future. Media companies fired writers and hired video producers. They created expensive video studios and teams.

Then Facebook stopped caring about video. The promised revenue never materialised. The traffic boost disappeared. Companies that had bet everything on video were left with expensive overhead and no sustainable business model.

The Illusion of Audience Building

Here’s the brutal truth about platform dependency: you never actually own your audience.

When someone follows your Facebook page, you don’t get their contact information. When they read your article on social media, you don’t have a direct relationship with them. They’re Facebook’s users, not your readers. You’re just content that keeps people on Facebook long enough to see ads.

If Facebook decides your content isn’t valuable to them anymore, your audience disappears. You can’t reach them. You can’t migrate them somewhere else. They were never really yours.

Smart media companies understood this. They tried to convert social traffic into email subscribers, app downloads, direct website visitors—anything that created owned relationships rather than rented access. But it was always a losing battle. The platforms made it deliberately difficult to convert platform users into direct relationships.

Why would Facebook help you build an audience outside Facebook? That’s against their interests. They want to be the intermediary forever. Dependency is the business model.

The Google Dependency

Facebook wasn’t the only platform media companies depended on. Google was the other pillar. SEO-optimised content drove massive search traffic, and that traffic could be monetised through ads.

This created a different kind of dependency. Media companies optimised for search algorithms, writing what would rank rather than what was important. The most valuable journalism—deep investigations, complex analysis, original reporting—often performed poorly in search. Simple explainers and service journalism ranked better.

So that’s what got produced. The incentives shaped the content. Google’s algorithm became the de facto editor for huge swaths of digital media.

Then Google started changing how search works. Featured snippets meant people didn’t need to click through to get information. Google displayed answers directly on the search results page. Traffic dropped.

Google Discover and Google News sent traffic, but on Google’s terms, following Google’s opaque rules. You could be getting millions of visitors from Google and then, for reasons nobody understood, it would just stop. Algorithm update, priority shift, nobody knows.

Like Facebook, Google was an unreliable partner. Helpful when it served their purposes, destructive when it didn’t.

The YouTube Gamble

When Facebook traffic died, some media companies went all-in on YouTube. Video was the future, after all. YouTube had better monetisation than Facebook, clearer metrics, and seemed more stable.

This worked for some. Outlets that truly understood YouTube’s culture and algorithms built sustainable businesses. But most traditional media companies struggled. They tried to make TV-quality content for YouTube audiences, which didn’t work. YouTube rewards frequency, personality, and direct audience relationships. It’s a creator economy, not a publisher economy.

Meanwhile, YouTube constantly changed its policies, monetisation rules, and algorithm priorities. Channels that were thriving would suddenly see revenue collapse because YouTube changed what kinds of content it advertised against. Or the algorithm would stop recommending their videos for reasons nobody could discern.

Again: platform dependency. You build on someone else’s land, you follow their rules, and they can change those rules whenever they want.

The Substack Question

Now media is fragmenting toward newsletters and subscription platforms. Substack is the current darling, promising writers they can build direct audience relationships and sustainable income.

But it’s the same pattern. Substack controls discovery. If you’re successful on Substack, it’s partly because Substack’s recommendation engine promotes you. If they change their priorities, your growth stops.

Yes, you can export your email list and move to another platform. That’s better than Facebook or Google. But will you? How much of your success is actually the platform versus your content? How many subscribers are reading you because they found you through Substack’s network effects?

Platform dependency is seductive because platforms provide real value. Distribution, discovery, infrastructure, monetisation. You’d be foolish not to use them. But you’d also be foolish to depend on them completely.

What Actually Works

The media companies that survived are the ones that diversified. They used platforms for distribution but built owned relationships. They had email lists, apps, membership programs, direct traffic. They weren’t hostage to any single platform’s algorithm changes.

They also tended to have older, more sustainable business models. Subscriptions, memberships, events, services beyond just content. They weren’t purely dependent on advertising, which meant they weren’t purely dependent on traffic, which meant they weren’t purely dependent on platforms.

The New York Times is the obvious example. They use platforms, but they’re not dependent on them. Most of their traffic comes directly to their website or app. Their subscription revenue comes from readers who pay them directly. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, The Times would be fine.

Most digital-native media companies couldn’t say the same. They built businesses that only worked if platform traffic kept flowing. When it didn’t, they collapsed.

The Lesson Nobody Learns

Every few years, there’s a new platform that media companies bet everything on. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, whatever comes next. The pattern is always the same.

Platform emerges and is hungry for content. Media companies provide content and get massive distribution. Platform becomes dominant and changes priorities. Media companies lose distribution and scramble to adapt. Repeat.

The lesson should be obvious: don’t build your entire business on someone else’s platform. But the incentives push toward platform dependency anyway. Platform distribution is how you grow fast. Venture capital wants growth. So you optimise for platforms, get big, raise more money, and hope you can figure out sustainability before the algorithm changes.

Most can’t. The graveyard of digital media companies is full of outlets that had millions of followers, hundreds of millions of visitors, and no sustainable business model once platform traffic dried up.

Where This Leaves Us

Digital media is more fragile than it appears. The outlets with the biggest audiences are often the most vulnerable, because those audiences are platform-mediated rather than direct relationships.

When the next algorithm change hits, when the next platform pivot happens, when the next distribution channel dries up, more media companies will collapse. We’ll act surprised, even though it’s entirely predictable.

The solution isn’t to avoid platforms entirely. It’s to treat them as distribution channels, not foundations. Build owned audience relationships. Diversify revenue. Create value that doesn’t depend on algorithmic promotion.

But mostly, we need to accept that digital media built on platform dependency is inherently unstable. These aren’t sustainable businesses—they’re gambles that sometimes pay off but usually don’t.

And until we stop pretending otherwise, we’re going to keep watching media companies that should have been successful collapse because they built everything on rented land.