You don't own your audience. Most people don't own their link either.
There was a thread here a couple of weeks ago where someone’s wife was being asked for $15/month just to see click data older than 30 days. That stuck with me, because it’s the small version of a bigger thing.
Everything in this job is rented. Followers, reach, whether the algorithm feels like showing your post today. The one piece that’s supposed to be yours is the link you hand people. And most of us rent that too, on somebody else’s domain.
Which means the URL you printed on your cards, put on your merch table, and stuck in every bio you have is only yours until that company changes its pricing or shuts down.
Three things I’ve come around to, and I’d like to hear where I’m wrong:
- The analytics paywall is the actual business model. The page is free because your click history is the product they sell back to you.
- The SEO argument against these tools is mostly overstated. Social bio links are nofollow anyway, so nothing was passing to your site to begin with. The domain ownership problem is the real one, and nobody talks about it.
- Almost everyone picks one of these in five minutes and never thinks about it again until the day they try to leave.
So: what are you actually using, and do you own the domain it sits on? Has anyone here moved off one and lost something they wish they hadn’t?
Disclosure: I build in this space, so I’m biased. Not naming it or linking it, that’s not what this post is for.