What Does 'Rented Audience' Mean, and Why Does It Matter Even If You Have a Huge Following?
Kylie Jenner has 400 million followers and she's still looking at Substack
Kylie Jenner has 400 million followers and she's still looking at Substack
A rented audience is any audience you've built on a platform you don't control. It looks like yours because the followers, the likes and the comments all show up under your name, but the platform decides who sees your content, when, and whether that changes tomorrow. You can lose access to a rented audience overnight through an algorithm change, a ban, a policy shift or a platform simply declining in relevance, no matter how large that audience was or how long it took to build.
The reason this is worth sitting with properly, rather than nodding along to as an obvious point, is that it doesn't stop mattering once you get big. If anything it matters more.
Why does the Kylie Jenner Substack detail matter more than it looks?
Kylie Jenner reportedly saying she's open to starting a newsletter on Substack is one of those headlines that's easy to scroll past. But it's worth sitting with longer than that. This is someone with one of the largest audiences on the internet, built over more than a decade, across nearly every platform that has mattered in that time. If reach solved the ownership problem, she would already have solved it.
It didn't. Audience size and audience ownership are not the same thing, and the bigger the following gets, the more exposed that gap becomes. She doesn't own her Instagram audience. Meta does. She has built an extraordinary amount of attention on land she doesn't hold the title to, and every post still has to clear an algorithm that owes her nothing, no matter how many followers sit on the other side of it.
An email list, by contrast, is portable. It doesn't rank, demote, shadow-ban or reshuffle based on a platform's quarterly engagement goals. If the platform changes its rules tomorrow, the list still exists. That's the entire appeal, and it has nothing to do with needing more reach. She has more reach than almost anyone. What she doesn't have is a channel she actually controls.
How do you tell if you have a rented audience problem?
You don't need Kylie Jenner's following for this to apply to you. Ask yourself these questions about your own content:
1. If this platform disappeared tomorrow, could someone who wanted to find me still find me? 2. Do I have any way to reach my audience that doesn't depend on an algorithm deciding to show them my content? 3. Is my best work sitting somewhere searchable with its own permanent link, or only inside a feed that's already moved past it? 4. Am I building reach, or am I building something I actually own alongside the reach? 5. If I had to start over on a new platform tomorrow, would I be starting from zero, or would I still have something?
Most founders answer honestly to at least one of these in a way that exposes the gap. That's not a failure. It's just the starting point for fixing it.
Does having your own channel mean you can ignore social media?
No, and this is the part that gets missed when people treat 'own your audience' as a reason to abandon social platforms entirely. Social media still does something an owned channel can't: it travels. It gets content in front of people who've never heard of you, through shares, algorithmic reach and discovery you didn't have to build yourself. An owned channel like an email list, a website or a structured archive doesn't travel the same way. It's where things land and stay, not where they're discovered in the first place.
The mistake isn't using social media. The mistake is treating social media as the whole system instead of one half of it. I've seen this exact gap play out in my own work. Stagger Inn Adventures, the 4WD tour business I ran with Mitch, isn't operating anymore. But the footage, the lessons and the knowledge from that chapter didn't disappear with the business. The business ended. The knowledge didn't. That only remains true because that content exists somewhere beyond the feed it was originally posted to. If it had only ever lived inside a platform's algorithm, it would have gone exactly where the business did.
Where does this leave founders who don't have anywhere near her reach?
This is actually the more useful question, because most founders aren't deciding whether to start a newsletter at the top of their fame. They're deciding whether to build an owned channel at all, early, before they're relying on it. The lesson from someone operating at that scale still looking for a place that's actually hers isn't a trend piece about Substack. It's a signal that owning a channel isn't a luxury move reserved for people who've already made it. It's a hedge against the exact thing fame, reach and virality don't protect you from.
Starting small doesn't mean starting late. If you have ten followers or ten thousand, the same principle applies: whatever you publish on a platform you don't control should eventually have a second home somewhere you do.
Creating the content is only half the problem. What happens to it after it's published is the other half, and that's the gap I built The Culo Village to close. It's not a social network competing for your attention, and it's not asking you to stop posting on Instagram or LinkedIn. It takes what you've already published, across whatever platforms you're using, and gives each piece its own permanent, searchable webpage, so the work you've made doesn't disappear the moment the algorithm stops showing it to people.
If you take one thing from this, make it this: don't wait until your following is large enough to justify owning a channel. Owning the channel is what makes the following worth having in the first place. Start building the part you control now, even in small pieces, so that whatever reach you do get on rented land isn't the only place your work exists.
Join the Culo Village to republish the posts you have already distributed as individual web articles, then use Culo Creatives in Canva in one repeatable, sustainable workflow.