I thought with recent news it is a good opportunity to write an additional post on why it is important to self host your content.
Soundcloud laid off 173 people. Not a good sign for podcasters, artists and DJs building a following on those platforms.
The situation at SoundCloud is quickly deteriorating, with bankruptcy potentially next. Company CEO Alex Ljung has just announced the layoff of 173 employees. Offices in San Francisco and London will be shutting down immediately.
Photobucket surprised its users by requiring them to pay for keeping their pictures online. If you have a few hundred posts up embedding pictures from Photobucket, you are in trouble.
What about Medium? They launched a paid product for readers in March (I do not know a single person having such a paid account). So content creators still do not have to pay to reach an audience. What if Medium decides one day only your last 10 storys are able to be consumed for free, but to keep everything online you have to pay? That day might come.
Your knowledge on Quora: You are using the Q&A platform to market yourself, answering questions, showing off your knowledge. That’s all behind closed doors, only accessible to other Quora users. That is easy to fix: Copy the answer and link back to Quora. Doc Searls is doing that, for example.
Not using services like Soundcloud, Photobucket, Medium or Quora means you potentially miss out on a big community, reach, great discussions and feedback. And you do not have to worry about the tech behind. So self hosting *all* your content clearly has its limitations, especially when you start out fresh and no one is finding the way to your domain.
If you are in for the long run, meaning you want your content to still be online in 10 or 20 years, think about selfhosting all your content as the first option, then about where to publish in addition.