This year, newsrooms eliminated hundreds of jobs, including more than 300 at the Washington Post.
A friend of mine still has her job there, for now. When I called her after the layoffs, she didn’t talk about herself. She talked about the colleagues she’d spent decades working alongside, the stories that died with them, and the work they spent years building toward, all gone overnight because Facebook and Google changed the rules.
We’ve been here before. You know this story.
Platforms Always Promise Reach—Dependency Is How They Get You
Publishers and brands have depended on Facebook and Google to deliver their audiences for two decades. Today, publishers are losing up to 90% of their traffic and revenue after AI-driven search and social platforms changed how content reaches audiences. Most publishers didn’t see it coming. The ones that did built direct relationships with their audiences and kept them.
Business Insider felt the impact, seeing organic search traffic drop 55% and laying off 21% of its staff. But People Inc. was able to pivot. It lost 50% of its Google sessions over the last two years, yet it’s still growing 15%. When asked how that is possible, CEO Neil Vogel explained, “We built our own assets. We’re doing all kinds of things to connect directly with advertisers and users. So when Google really fell off a cliff two years ago, we were prepared for it.”
Few understand this dynamic better than Bhargav Patel, who spent his career building the infrastructure for rented reach. Now, he’s building what comes next. He’s the founder and CEO of Genuin, a client of PenVine, and he doesn’t mince words: “The brands that treated digital infrastructure as a future priority woke up one day to find that the platforms they had been ignoring had become the intermediaries standing between them and their own consumers.” He added, “AI is accelerating that dynamic by an order of magnitude. The decisions brands and publishers make about infrastructure in the next 12 to 18 months will not just shape their competitive position. They will determine whether they still own a direct relationship with their audience at all.”
This is a warning every brand should take seriously.
Social gaming company Zynga is a tale of platform dependence gone bad. Remember Farmville? It was the most popular game on Facebook. At its peak, Zynga represented nearly 20% of Facebook’s total revenue. When Facebook restructured its algorithm and payment terms, Zynga’s stock collapsed 75%.
Zynga survived by doing what every brand should consider now: It focused on attracting players to its own destinations. A decade later, Take-Two Interactive acquired them for $12.7 billion.
While Zynga is an extreme example, the issues brands face today are no less urgent. Brands are still renting reach, bound by a landlord’s rules that change without notice, at the mercy of an algorithm that controls the entire engagement experience.
Now, there’s a new landlord: ChatGPT. Different platform, same dependency. For the first time, marketers plan to increase investment in AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews over traditional search advertising. But Sonata Insights analyst Debra Aho Williamson cautions, “Marketers shouldn’t allow the AI platforms to dictate the rules of engagement with consumers. Brands have an important role to play, too.” She believes that when AI gets it wrong, consumers won’t blame the platform. They’ll blame the brand.
Sephora made a bet on ChatGPT. The beauty retailer spent 20 years building 80 million Beauty Insider members into one of retail’s most valuable owned audiences. Yet, they launched an app inside ChatGPT to power discovery. Sephora essentially outsourced the discovery phase of the customer journey to OpenAI. They get a bump in reach, but OpenAI owns the first impression, the data and the customer relationship.
It’s a gamble. Who’s to say the platform won’t eventually use that data to steer those new audiences elsewhere?
Consumers Don’t Trust The Feed, So Why Do Brands Keep Buying In?
It’s a paradox. And McKinsey calls it stark.
With distrust in AI at an all-time high, 74% of consumers say AI makes it harder to trust what they see online. McKinsey partner Kari Alldredge agrees, saying, “I don’t believe that marketers’ budgets have caught up with where consumers’ heads are at.” She says marketers should be “thinking more broadly about the allocation of spend and potentially shifting some of it away from social media.”
The irony: Social media ad revenue hit $117.7 billion in 2025, up 32.6% year over year. This means brands are doubling down on the very environments where consumer trust is at an all-time low. It’s a disconnect that tells you everything about how deep this dependency goes.
What 80% of consumers do trust is the brands they use. That trust wasn’t built on a social platform. It was built through direct engagement.
The Brands That Stopped Paying Rent
There’s a shift underway. Brands are turning static websites and apps into living destinations by offering the same generative experiences platforms use. Consumers can discover products, shop, engage with peers and collaborate with brands. The brand controls the content, the commerce and the conversation.
Take Pacsun, which launched PS Community Hub, a social-driven, AI-personalized platform where content discovery, commerce and creator connection all live inside its own ecosystem. Similarly, TED launched TED Shorts inside its own app, a personalized feed that lets users engage directly within TED’s own ecosystem.
Then there’s iHeartMedia, which launched iHeartRadio Highlights inside its own platform, bringing shows like Elvis Duran on Z100 to life as short-form video experiences. And McClatchy, which turned its static digital properties into living generative video feeds across dozens of its national magazines and local newspapers, including Us Weekly, Life & Style and the Miami Herald.
Some brands are building their own infrastructure. Others are embedding infrastructure to launch and monetize owned experiences at scale.
End Platform Dependency Before The Rules Change Again
Is this the end of rented reach? Probably not.
After two decades of watching this re-run, I know how it ends. Years of chasing platforms have come at the cost of the one thing you can never get back: a direct relationship with your customer. That’s a steep price to pay.
Before the next budget gets approved, ask yourself one question: If the platform changed the rules tomorrow, what would you have left?
Feature image credit: Getty
By Jennifer Schenberg,
Jennifer Schenberg is Chief Storyteller and Narrative Architect at PenVine, a B2B Tech PR agency for category-defining brands. Read Jennifer Schenberg’s full executive profile here.
Find Jennifer Schenberg on LinkedIn. Visit Jennifer’s website.
