Content: Buying or Renting?

During law school, I rented one of those industrial chic lofts downtown. Concrete floors, exposed brick, ductwork all over the place.

Of the many bad decisions I made during that time of my life—like going to law school—renting that apartment wasn’t so terrible.

What bothers me about that decision, though, is how stupid my attitude toward home ownership was. Which is to say, I believed that there was no real difference financially between renting and owning.

I’ve now learned the myriad benefits of investing in real estate and am, frankly, ashamed of just how bad a take that was. Yet I find myself taking a similar approach to Law School Tony when it comes to creating content online.

I’ve been posting content consistently on LinkedIn this year and have gained a bit of traction writing about creativity. But there’s a sense of underlying unease around the practice, in that I’m basically providing LinkedIn with a form of free labor (in that the platform benefits from my sweet, sweet content) while I’m merely renting the space and audience.

This reality came into sharp focus a few weeks back when a LinkedIn buddy of mine, Sam Browne, was permanently banned from the platform. The ban was lifted after 24 hours with a stern final warning, but the fundamental problem remains. I can get removed from the platform for any reason—or no reason at all—without warning.

I talked to Mickey Mellen, a marketing pro, about this recently. He posted on his daily blog every day for more than a year before breaking the streak last week, and has written about his approach to this question. He turned me on to the POSSE concept, popularized by IndieWeb.

POSSE: Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Put simply, it’s better to own my content than to rent space from a third party.

They say that getting wealthy isn’t about how much money you make, but how much you keep. Maybe there’s something similar to be said about the Creator Economy we now occupy. Succeeding in the Creator Economy isn’t so much about how much content you make or attention you earn, but how much you keep and direct.

I’ve rationalized not having my own blog for a few years now by saying I’m not trying to do anything. That’s short-sighted thinking. To succeed in this economy, we must have a body of Work.

And that body of Work needs a home.