A great many bloggers, writers, journalists and others who write a lot seem to have given up on the idea of building their own thing, it seems the success of ‘Medium’ and other blogging platforms have effectively stymied the growth of independent production; I think this is just crazy!

It is natural, when you think about it, we see these platforms seemingly dominating the web, attracting enormous numbers of readers, and they have bottomless pockets when it comes to marketing!

However, consider the big picture here: prior to the web becoming available for the public, who could publish?

If you were very lucky in your friends you might get an inside track and have your book accepted by one of the publishing companies, or you could write letters to the editors of major newspapers, self-fund a run of pamphlets, be published in a magazine, or industry specific publication, just maybe you would get an invitation to talk on a radio, or T.V show.

What options did the unknown ‘person of ideas’ really have? They were very limited, that is the correct answer!

We might have become terribly sophisticated, and think we know what social media is all about, and maybe we have have become just a little bit blase about all of this web stuff; the reality is that the web is all ordinary people have between us, and the looming abyss of authoritarian dystopia.

We are forgetting just what a colossal opportunity the WWW really is; don’t be lulled into forgoing your right to publish.

If you can set up your own domain, and commence publishing, you have the capacity to present all kinds of content, and this can be visible and valuable to others, Medium might be incredibly successful today, but a year is a very long time on the internet; your domain can prevail well beyond the life cycle of a Silicon Valley project.

Don’t be discouraged from building your own media organisation, because this is a genuine asset, even if you don’t attract many readers, or visitors to begin with, you can build on this. Your name and your ideas can reach corners of the web community, this is an incremental process.

This is just a short message of encouragement, yes it is still a very important and valuable thing to do, build a blog, or media platform under your own domain.