There is a comforting fiction in marketing that attention can be acquired: bought once, owned thereafter, banked like a customer list. It cannot. Attention is rented, the lease is short, and the landlord raises the rent precisely as you come to depend on the address.
Every channel follows the same arc. Early, it is cheap and generous, because it needs you more than you need it. Then it fills, the algorithm tightens, and the reach you once got for free now carries a toll. The platform was never your audience. It was the road between you and them, and it can charge whatever the traffic will bear.
If a single channel can switch off your business by changing a setting, you were never the owner. You were a tenant.
The only hedge is to convert rented attention into something you hold directly: a relationship, a habit, a reason to come back that does not route through anyone else’s algorithm. Spend the rented reach buying your way off the rental market.