How to protect your brand from being de-platformed

The channels of popular creators, podcasters, and authors have been deleted and yours could be, too. Let’s get into why that’s true and what you should do to protect yourself from a similar outcome.

We’re talking about the concept of building on borrowed land, anything where you are communicating with your audience solely through the platform. If you don’t own the data or communication channel, you’re risking your long-term ability to communicate with your audience.

You can no longer build a secure audience on “borrowed” platforms where the channel of communication between you and your audience is owned by someone else. Not having access to files that connect you to your audience is dangerous because platforms have proven their willingness to de-platform users.

Case studies have shown that individual persons within large organizations like YouTube have the ability to deem, content as dangerous and delete the channel, an idea that is super concerning.

Right or wrong, it’s your responsibility as a marketer to ensure that you can retain access to your community. You spend time building it, your company’s probably invested money to build this audience, you need to be able to communicate with them over time.

The best way to do that is by building a wholly-owned communication channel of some kind.

#1 — Build a wholly-owned email list

Collecting emails over time is an excellent tactic. If for whatever reason you weren’t able to use a single email provider (and that doesn’t generally happen), you could just go over to another one, upload your email database, and you’re ready to go.

#2 — Have an RSS feed (podcast)

A podcast is essentially an RSS feed. That’s the medium. That’s the channel where your subscribers are and information is being communicated. While you could be removed from a certain distribution platform like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, the RSS feed itself—as long as you set it up correctly (and that’s why you should contact us if you have any questions on that)—won’t be removed. You’ll be able to talk to your RSS feed, your channel, your audience over time.

#3 — Run a channel

The other idea here is to do something like discord or a Slack channel, specifically where you have the opportunity to have an email opt-in or you have the ability to access their email. This isn’t totally different than just building the email database singularly, but it is a more interactive platform. There are a lot of advantages to using something where users can agree to share their email.


If you as a small business have spent the money and the time to build up an email list of even 10-15,000 people and all of a sudden the rest of your channels go away and you’re not able to communicate with them for whatever reason.

Again, it just takes one person misunderstanding or not liking or whatever what you have to say, then that email list becomes a lifesaver, that becomes your lifeboat in terms of being able to continue to communicate with your audience.