The Rental Agreement You Never Signed

At 7:12 a.m., the analytics dashboard refreshes and the floor disappears. Yesterday, Hessel Broekstra’s YouTube channel had made a hundred dollars. Today it shows six. He hadn’t violated any policies. He hadn’t changed his content. The algorithm changed. A bug, YouTube later admitted. But by then the damage was real, quantifiable, permanent for some creators who never recovered.

This keeps happening. Different platforms, same pattern. The business model works fine until suddenly it doesn’t.

Platform dependency doesn’t feel like dependency until the platform changes its mind. Your Instagram account has 50,000 followers, your posts get engagement, the DMs convert to sales. It feels like an asset you built. Then the algorithm changes and your reach drops 80 percent.

Most businesses don’t realize they signed a rental agreement. They think they’re accumulating customers. What they’re actually accumulating is permission to reach customers, and that permission can be revoked or diluted at any moment. Not because you did anything wrong. Because the platform decided to change how it works.

That’s the thing about dependency. It never feels like dependency when it’s paying the bills.

When the Walls Move In (Organic Reach Collapse)

Instagram’s organic reach has dropped 80 to 85 percent since 2020. If you had 10,000 followers five years ago and your posts reached 1,500 of them, today that same post reaches maybe 200. The followers didn’t unfollow. They didn’t stop caring. The walls just closed in by 85 percent.

One boutique owner described trying everything: different posting times, new hashtags, completely different content strategies. Nothing worked. She thought she was failing.

She wasn’t alone. A 2025 survey found that 87 percent of businesses watched their reach collapse over the past 18 months. Larger accounts had it worse. Some were seeing reach below 1 percent. The pattern wasn’t individual failure. It was structural change. The organic reach kept declining. If you want the same visibility now, you buy ads.

By 2025, the monthly value of a social media follower had settled at eight cents. An email subscriber generated 58 cents. Not a marginal difference. A sevenfold multiplier. One thousand email subscribers produce the same monthly revenue as 7,400 social media followers. One address you own. One algorithm you rent.

The conversion rates told the same story. Email marketing converted at 2.8 percent for consumer businesses. Organic social media converted at 2.4 percent. Email was 40 times more effective at customer acquisition overall, depending on how you measure it.

The lease terms had changed. Most businesses were still operating under the old agreement.

Maybe we all knew this already. It’s just easier to believe the graph means permanence.

Whose Switch Is It Anyway (Platform Infrastructure Risk)

In August 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content. The platform’s entire creator economy was built on adult content, and now the company was planning to eliminate it. The decision got reversed after massive backlash, but the incident revealed how fragile the whole structure was.

Creators depended on OnlyFans. OnlyFans depended on its payment processors. The payment processors—Visa and Mastercard and BNY Mellon—could unilaterally decide what kind of business they were willing to facilitate. One creator described them as “the silent shadowy blacklisting cabal that dictates the kind of moral behavior we’re allowed to engage in, who, without any sort of oversight, can wipe any company they wish out of existence.”

When TikTok faced a potential U.S. ban in 2024, the company’s own court filings projected $1.3 billion in losses for American small businesses and creators in just the first month. Over a billion dollars in revenue, gone, because a platform that businesses had spent years building audiences on might get shut down for geopolitical reasons that had nothing to do with those businesses.

A thousand creators filed the same support tickets after YouTube’s March 2023 revenue bug. Different names, identical graphs. Ninety-percent drops that no one could fix. Some reported daily income falling from $100 to $6. Others watched their channels flatline completely. The bug got patched eventually. The lost revenue didn’t come back.

After the Lights Go Out (Recovery Timelines)

The difference between having an owned channel and not having one shows up in recovery time.

Three to six months if you planned ahead. Twelve to eighteen if you didn’t. You’re starting from zero. You have to rebuild audience, reestablish trust, recreate the distribution mechanism that disappeared. Some businesses never recover. The YouTube creators who lost 90 percent of their revenue to algorithm bugs, the Instagram businesses that watched their reach collapse, the OnlyFans creators who faced overnight platform elimination. Not all of them made it back.

The businesses that survive platform volatility systematically converted platform audiences into owned audiences before the crisis hit.

Finding a Door That Stays Unlocked (Audience Migration)

Moving people off-platform requires intention more than complexity. You offer something valuable in exchange for an email address. Coupons convert at up to 82 percent. Webinars around 70. Quizzes and interactive content somewhere between 20 and 40 depending on execution.

The people who give you their email address were already interested. You’re creating a direct line that doesn’t depend on an algorithm deciding whether to show them your next post. Every email subscriber is a customer relationship you actually own in the infrastructural sense: you can reach them directly. No intermediary. No one can change the rules overnight and cut off that access.

Most businesses keep building their entire customer acquisition strategy on platforms. They post daily to Instagram, optimize for TikTok’s algorithm, chase YouTube’s monetization requirements. They do it without systematically capturing those audiences into channels they control.

The Bill Always Comes Due (The Cost of Waiting)

The best time to build an email list was 2016, before Instagram killed the chronological feed and organic reach started its long collapse. The second best time is today, before whatever algorithm change or policy shift or infrastructure crisis happens next.

The pattern is consistent across platforms and years. Organic reach declines. Policies change. Revenue sources disappear overnight. The businesses that survive these disruptions treated platform audiences as temporary permission rather than permanent assets.

Organic reach on Instagram dropped 80 to 85 percent between 2020 and 2025. Businesses that built their distribution on that reach had to rebuild or start paying for visibility. The ones with email lists could keep reaching their customers directly.

The lesson isn’t new. It’s just unpaid rent coming due.

Plate Lunch Collective tracks these patterns in our weekly AI market intelligence reports. We help businesses build distribution strategies that don't evaporate when algorithms change. Reach out.