In 2012, a woman I knew made six-figures as a 'Vine' star. Do you remember Vine? It was a short-form video app, bought by Twitter back in 2012, and allowed its users to stitch together a six-second video, known for its looping effect. This is of course pretty commonplace now, since the explosion of ‘the content creator' (according to the Financial Times, there are over 16 million content creators in the UK alone) but back then it was quite a rare job to have. The app exploded in popularity, and then in 2016, Twitter suddenly shut it down. Overnight, it vanished and she was suddenly jobless with zero income.
You could say Vine was somewhat the first iteration of TikTok, which has almost 2 billion active monthly users. Cut to now, online creators are once again worried about their livelihoods, with the potential upcoming ban of TikTok in the U.S, which has arisen amid security concerns that the app might pass on user data to the Chinese government. According to the BBC, US President Trump has signed 'an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law banning the app if it is not sold'. A recent Forbes article interviewed various TikTok creators, and said it would 'upend the lives and livelihoods of creators' who had spent years and years building their audience.
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Ever since Vine's closure story 13 years ago, I’ve always been wary of committing to one platform and building a livelihood in just one place. (After all, I wrote a book called The Multi-Hyphen Method, about having fingers in pies). Working in social media (at agencies first, and then as a social media editor at a legacy magazine brand) I saw so many platforms launch and then fold, launch and then fold. This is why so many young people, both millennials and gen Z, often feel they have nothing stable to hold onto. In a crumbling political system, crippling housing market and a world of disappearing social media apps, many don’t feel they can build the solid ecosystem their parents did. So why bother even trying? Hence the rise of ‘small treats’ culture. If you can’t build your own assets, then who wouldn't want to order nice matcha latté for a little afternoon boost.
However, career longevity is possible—it just might take different forms over time. I have made a career out of writing online since I was 19 years old. When I was 25, I wrote a book published by Penguin called Ctrl Alt Delete: How I Grew Up Online, chronicling a life spent navigating the internet as a teen onwards. After all, millennials were the first digital natives, albeit with a Nokia 3210, so it’s no surprise that I’ve spent the last decade moving around the internet like a digital Dick Whittington, from pillar to post, building an audience that I’ve always taken with me. A short list of places I’ve spent time building audiences over the years: Blogger.com, Wordpress, Tinyletter, Tumblr, MailChimp, SquareSpace and Substack.
There are so many options nowadays, so much marketing and advertising and societal ‘shoulds’, and so we must remember the importance of critical thinking. Before you join an app, ask yourself why. We know that our attentions spans are shrinking, that we can spend hours and hours doom-scrolling, so it’s never been more crucial to stop and pause and think 'how do I want to spend my time?'. I’ve always been wary of people around me who get suddenly very excited about a new platform and ask everyone to download it immediately. Remember Clubhouse or Vero? I got endless invitations which I ignored. Because after the initial rush dies down, you’re left with an app that gathers dust. At the time of writing, I have messages from friends wanting me to join Threads, Bluesky and Signal. However, I’ve declined and said I am at app capacity.
Deep down, I’ve always tried to remain platform agnostic. After all, the platform itself is just the thing that houses your words or content, not the words themselves. Perhaps amidst the chaos, we can keep calm and carry on by staying neutral and finding ways to own our work instead of giving it away and spreading ourselves too thin. Get excited about shiny new platforms, sure, but know that underneath the outer shell of a platform is you and everything you have to offer: your career, your interests, your talent. Invest in yourself, don’t work for Instagram for free.
There’s something to be said for the power of the humble newsletter. I have written one for the past decade, but I've spent the last three years growing a thriving community specifically on Substack, and yet, as much as I love the platform currently, I do not need Substack to exist forever in order for me to continue building my business. I can take my email subscribers with me at any time. This feels important and is a major perk of the platform for creators.
I often get asked 'how do I grow my platform?' and I feel it is asking the wrong question. What does it even mean to ‘grow a platform’ out of context? You can grow your interests, your career, your curiosity, your work, your output, your skills, your readership, your hobbies. That’s where the focus should be. Material first, platform second.
Writing that sentence, I can’t help but think of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who famously said: 'Jokes first, structure second' when sharing how she wrote Fleabag. Gather your material first. Ask yourself what you want to say and why — then figure out where you want to put it. And instead of blasting things into the ether on any social media platform going, perhaps the best thing to do now is to make sure you own your subscriber list.
Table For One by Emma Gannon is out on 24 April 2025
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