Here's why owning your content and cutting out the middleman is the smartest long-term bet you can make.

Hello there, wonderful people. How is your morning run? Mine is excellent, thank you for asking.

So I'm running through my neighborhood today and I pass by this property. There's a sign. You know what it says? "Please don't make U-turns here." On a part of the street. A public road. The owner of that property is so frustrated by life that they felt the need to put up a sign telling strangers how to drive on a road they don't own. And look, I'm not making fun of anyone's struggles. But this kind of energy - this need to control things that are none of your business - is exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to raise my kids somewhere else. Somewhere with a bit more breathing room in people's heads.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. Let's talk about something far more exciting.

We Built Real Websites

It's 2026. And I have made a real website. A website that actually exists on the internet. It has the possibility of being ranked by Google. It has a robots.txt file - that's the file that instructs crawlers from LLM companies what they can and cannot do on your site. Whether they can learn from your content. Whether they can describe it and show it in search results. I set all of that up, and I feel great about it.

But here is the bigger news. My kid, Helena, has also launched her own site. A blog with videos and lots of text, all in English. She's a young person and she already understands something that most adults haven't figured out yet - you don't need a social media platform to reach people.

As I've said many times before, pretty much every platform today is a social media platform. Substack is a social media platform. Medium is a social media platform. Instagram, X, Threads - I don't even have to list them all. And that is exactly why I went back to publishing a podcast and a website. I simply don't want a company sitting between me and the people who might enjoy reading what I write, watching what I record, or listening to my podcast.

Helena Gets It

Helena believes in the same thing. She prefers to give people a web address rather than directing them to some platform and saying "search for Helena." That takes courage when you're young and everyone around you lives on groupchats and social media.

Now, if we are both sufficiently long-term thinkers, and sufficiently committed to doing this reliably week by week, we will ride the revolution that is happening right now around us. The revolution of LLMs. And in the future, this change will touch social media platforms too, because social media platforms are heavily AI-driven already. If you didn't know - the algorithms that decide what you see on social media are built by AI, by large neural networks. They have been for a while.

This change that is happening right now will completely shift the dynamics. And I believe there will be a comeback to normal websites run by real people. No mediation. No algorithm deciding who gets to see your work. Just you, your content, and the public.

Slow Growth, Long-Term Value

I know that our websites - mine and Helena's - will not grow as fast as maybe a Substack or an X profile would. But we believe in something that will be long-term valuable rather than something that will grow fast. There's a big difference between those two things.

And if you're curious about the tech - we run our websites on Ghost. It's a very good framework for running websites. It was initially designed to run newsletters, but today you can build a very nice looking site with all the functions you need. What is very important is that the links Ghost creates are flat. That means if you connect a domain to a Ghost site, you get yourdomain.com and then the title of your post. Clean and simple. That kind of structure is far more easily manageable by LLMs and Google crawlers, which means our content might appear in results faster.

So this is it. This is why we decided to launch websites in 2026. Old school websites with old school links and a modern infrastructure. Ghost is very modern, very up to date. We're just using the best of both worlds - the independence of the early web and the tools of today. If you have questions, leave them below. And please, if this makes sense to you, go build your own little corner of the internet. You won't regret it.

Research and Further Reading

1. Platform dependence and creator vulnerability - Caplan, R. & Gillespie, T. (2020). "Tiered Governance and Demonetization: The Shifting Terms of Labor and Compensation in the Platform Economy." Social Media + Society, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120936636
2. Algorithmic curation and content visibility on social platforms - Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L.A. (2015). "Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook." Science, 348(6239), 1130-1132. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160
3. Impact of AI-driven recommendation systems on information access - Milano, S., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). "Recommender Systems and Their Ethical Challenges." AI & Society, 35, 957-967. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-00950-y
4. The open web and decentralized publishing - Zuckerman, E. (2020). "The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure." Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure
5. AI crawlers, robots.txt, and the future of web indexing - "Is Misinformation More Open? A Study of robots.txt Gatekeeping on the Web" (2025). arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/html/2510.10315v1