"Why Building an Audience Is a Scam in 2025"

In 2021, they told us: “Just build an audience.”

Post daily. Be consistent. Share value. Attract the right people.

It was the golden formula whispered across Twitter threads, indie hacker newsletters, and YouTube advice videos. Anyone trying to make a name for themselves online—especially designers, marketers, and solo creatives—latched onto the dream.

By 2023, nearly every portfolio site had a Substack link. Every designer had a carousel strategy. Every “founder” was a content creator, churning out value posts like they were fast food orders.

But here we are in 2025—and the game has changed.

Radically.

The Truth They Don’t Tell You

Building an audience in 2025 often feels like building a sandcastle during a storm.

Algorithms don’t care about your consistency anymore. People don’t follow to buy. Your best-performing post? It was probably a joke. Or an outrage-bait opinion you didn't even fully believe.

And that meticulously designed carousels series you spent a week on? It got buried within five hours—overtaken by AI-generated posts, engagement pods, and rage-filled threads designed to farm dopamine and clicks.

We're not just fighting for attention. We're fighting against systems built to make content creation feel like a job with no salary.

Attention ≠ Opportunity

The biggest lie the “build an audience” crowd sold us was this: that attention naturally turns into income.

But in 2025, attention is inflated. You can have 50,000 followers and still struggle to get five people to click a link. Platforms have throttled reach. Organic growth is a myth unless you're controversial or already famous.

And even if you do break through—what’s next?
Another content sprint. Another dopamine loop. Another silent month where your posts fall flat, and you spiral.

Building an audience has become a treadmill. Not a bridge.

Who Does It Really Serve?

Let’s be real: this dream isn’t just broken—it was never built for us.

“Building an audience” is a business model for platforms, not people.

The more creators post, the more data, engagement, and ads platforms can sell. We build content empires that we don’t even own, on land we don’t control. Instagram owns your reach. LinkedIn owns your leads. YouTube owns your subscribers. And at any moment, the algorithm can ghost you.

The people selling audience-building as a “freedom strategy” are often the same ones selling courses about how to do it.

And they’re the only ones really winning.

What You Can Build Instead

This doesn’t mean connection is dead. It means we need to shift our energy from building audiences to building assets.

Assets like:

A portfolio that converts in 10 seconds.
A one-page site that gets you consulting calls.
A product that sells without going viral.
A niche community where trust matters more than trends.

Because here’s the truth: you don’t need 10,000 followers.
You need 10 people who actually care. 10 people who’ll hire you, refer you, or collaborate with you. That’s where creative leverage actually begins.

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