Your LinkedIn audience is rented: LinkedIn decides who sees each post, can change the algorithm at any time, and doesn't let you take your followers with you. To own your audience, keep building on LinkedIn where your buyers already are, and steadily move some of that attention into a channel you control, usually an email newsletter plus a simple website. LinkedIn is the distribution. The list is the asset.
If you've built a following on LinkedIn, you don't own that audience. LinkedIn does. You can't control who sees your next post, you can't message all your followers at once, and if the algorithm changes tomorrow, your reach changes with it. That's what people mean when they call LinkedIn rented land.
So keep building there, since for most B2B founders LinkedIn is still where the buyers are, and own one channel next to it: an email list, and a website that people can find without LinkedIn's permission.
I say this as someone who builds a product to help leaders grow on LinkedIn. I've had more than 4 million impressions there in under a year. I still don't own the audience behind them.
Why LinkedIn is rented land
Here's the plain version, the way I explained it in a writing session a while ago. You can't call a LinkedIn audience a growth loop or an owned channel. If you rely on LinkedIn, you rely on rented space. You rely on an algorithm that can change, for personal accounts too. The fact that I have an audience doesn't mean I own it, because I can't control whom the algorithm shows my posts to.
Three things make it rented:
- LinkedIn decides distribution. Your organic reach is set post by post, and every post starts from zero. Having 10,000 followers means LinkedIn might show your post to some of them, depending on how early viewers react. There's no "send to all."
- The rules change without notice. A format that gets huge reach one year can get throttled the next. When your reach drops, you usually find out by watching the numbers fall, and most of the time you haven't been shadow-banned. The rules just moved.
- You can't take the audience with you. Your followers exist inside LinkedIn. If you want to reach them somewhere else, you have to convince them one at a time.
I don't hold this against LinkedIn. It's a free platform and it owes you nothing. That's the deal, and it helps to see it clearly.
What you own on LinkedIn, and what you don't
Some things you build on LinkedIn really are yours. Some aren't. Here's how I split it:
| What you build on LinkedIn | Do you own it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Follower count | No | It lives inside LinkedIn and only matters if LinkedIn shows them your posts |
| Who sees each post | No | The algorithm decides, post by post |
| LinkedIn newsletter subscribers | No | There's no export of subscriber email addresses |
| Your posts | Mostly | You wrote them. Keep your own copies so you can reuse them anywhere |
| Your reputation and point of view | Yes | People remember what you stand for, on or off the platform |
| Relationships you moved to DMs, email or calls | Yes | Once you've talked directly, the platform isn't in the middle anymore |
| Your email list | Yes | You can export it, move it, and reach every person on it |
The pattern: the numbers belong to LinkedIn, the relationships belong to you. Your job is to turn more of the first column into the second.
The irony of a LinkedIn company saying this
I'm aware of the irony. I build a tool that helps leaders grow through LinkedIn, and I'm telling you the platform is rented.
I think both things are true at once. LinkedIn is the best place I know for a B2B founder to get discovered by the people who matter. It also isn't a foundation. The audience you build there is really LinkedIn's audience, and LinkedIn lets you borrow it.
I felt this most clearly on the day I launched Liftli publicly. I had worked on the launch post for a couple of days. Before posting, I made sure the website was live and my newsletter was running. Then I posted, and in the first hour LinkedIn showed the post to fewer than 200 people. The people who saw it engaged at a high rate. The distribution was still out of my hands.
The things I controlled that day were the website and the newsletter. Those were the only places where "the people who care about what I'm doing" meant something I could act on.
Owned vs rented channels: what growth people already know
Growth people have been saying this about marketing channels for years. Elena Verna, one of the sharpest growth operators writing about this, argues for prioritizing owned and earned channels over paid and social ones, where you're essentially paying for access to someone else's audience. She's also made the point that growth loops saturate, get more expensive, or collapse over time.
What most people miss when they share that framework: a leader's personal audience can become an owned channel, but only if it lives somewhere you control. Your reputation compounds and follows you. Your LinkedIn follower count doesn't.
So I'd put it like this. Your personal brand is one of the few growth assets that survives a pivot, a new job, or a new company. The distribution for it is rented. Build the brand in public on LinkedIn, and store the relationships somewhere you own.
LinkedIn vs newsletter vs website: what each one is for
Founders tend to frame this as a choice. You need all three, because each one does a different job.
| Channel | Who owns it | What it's good for | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn posts | Discovery. Reaching people who don't know you yet | Reach is decided by an algorithm you don't control | |
| LinkedIn newsletter | Fast subscriber growth from your existing network | No email export. Still rented | |
| Email newsletter (Substack, Beehiiv, etc.) | You | Reaching the same people reliably, on your schedule | Grows slower. You have to earn every subscriber |
| Your website | You | A permanent home people and search engines can find | Nobody visits unless something sends them |
In practice they work as a funnel. LinkedIn finds people. Your newsletter keeps them. Your website is where both point, and where your best thinking lives permanently. If you're choosing a newsletter platform, I compared them on exactly this ownership question in Substack vs Beehiiv vs LinkedIn Newsletter.
One more reason to keep publishing on LinkedIn even though it's rented: public LinkedIn posts are also part of what AI assistants learn about who you are. The rented platform still does work for you outside the feed.
How to own your audience while building on LinkedIn
A small, steady habit is enough: keep moving attention from LinkedIn into something you own. Here's the setup I'd recommend to any founder:
- Keep LinkedIn as your main place to publish. That's where discovery happens. Don't cut back posting to "focus on the newsletter."
- Start one owned channel. An email newsletter is the simplest. It doesn't need to be weekly. Monthly is fine if it's good.
- Give people a reason to subscribe. Tell them exactly what they'll get, something like "every month I write up the full numbers behind one experiment." A bare "subscribe to my newsletter" gives them nothing to say yes to.
- Put the link where people look. Your profile's Featured section, your About section, and the end of an occasional post where the newsletter is the natural next step. Don't bolt it onto every post.
- Move good conversations off the feed. When a comment thread gets interesting, take it to a DM or a call. That relationship is now yours.
- Keep your own archive. Save every post you publish somewhere outside LinkedIn. Your best posts become newsletter pieces and website pages later.
- Check the ratio, not just the reach. Once a quarter, look at how many LinkedIn followers you gained and how many email subscribers. If the second number is near zero, you're only building on rented land.
I think of each LinkedIn post as a first touch. The goal of the first touch is a second one somewhere you own.
When rented land is fine
I don't want to overstate this. For a lot of founders, LinkedIn alone is doing its job.
If your buyers are on LinkedIn, your goal is credibility and inbound conversations, and deals start in DMs anyway, then a LinkedIn audience you can't export still creates real value. The conversations you start there become relationships you own the moment you talk directly. That's often enough.
It becomes a problem in three situations:
- Your business depends on reaching the same people repeatedly. A course, a paid community, a product launch. You need a list for that.
- Most of your pipeline comes from LinkedIn reach. One algorithm change can cut your pipeline, and you'll have nowhere to go.
- Your buyers aren't mainly on LinkedIn. Then you're renting in the wrong neighborhood. I wrote about what to do when your buyers aren't on LinkedIn.
If none of those apply, keep going on LinkedIn and start a small list in the background. If one of them applies, start the list this month.