#107 You’ve Been Renting the Whole Time

I’ve been thinking about traffic in this industry for years, and I’ve finally admitted something to myself that I don’t love admitting.

Performance marketing has never really been a business. It’s been a rental.

First through channels. Then through less reputable means. Let me walk you through where each one actually stands, because the rumours circulating right now don’t match what I’m seeing.

Start with SEO. “SEO is dead” is a rumour and nothing more; traffic hasn’t disappeared, it’s been redistributed. Everyone in this industry has watched what Phoenixio has built. The intent hasn’t gone anywhere; it’s simply changed direction. I have access to hundreds of thousands of sessions from real users, and the growth from AI sources isn’t a feeling anymore, I can see ChatGPT climbing, noticeably, week over week. The referral data on the analytical platforms confirms the same story from a different angle.

The ROI story is separate. Listing fees, hybrid models, and even on the good sites, you’re waiting ten to twelve months to see it pay off. I still prioritise this traffic anyway, cost be damned, because the chance of landing a genuinely high-value customer is far higher here than anywhere else on this list. And if you’ve already got established customer segments, SEO earns its keep twice over,  a user lands on a relevant review site, sees your brand, remembers it, and comes back on his own terms weeks later.

PPC has genuinely died, but only offshore. In white regions there is still nothing that beats it. A colleague of mine runs an agency spending over ten million dollars a month on Tier 1 advertising, and what I’ve seen from the US campaigns and white-label brands is extraordinary. I haven’t seen numbers like that in a long time.

Facebook, the white-hat version and the version nobody puts in the case study, is now the only scalable performance channel left in the grey markets, in terms of volume and the predictability that comes with it. It used to sit third, behind SEO and PPC. It’s first now, and not because it improved. It’s first because the other two collapsed in the offshore segment and left it standing alone. In-house marketing is a genuinely powerful lever here if you’ve got whitelist access. I know operators targeting sixty percent ROI in the first month. That traffic exists. It is also worth its weight in gold, which tells you something about how rare it’s become.

Streamers are either a gamble or a scam, depending on who’s running the programme. Some of you are chasing the online-activity angle. I’m only interested in the ones producing performance and ROI, and there aren’t many.

Affiliate marketing rounds out the list, and it’s the hardest one to be generous about — a complex channel with very few real experts, routinely weak ROI on its own, and it only earns its place in combination with something else. Never as a standalone strategy.

And Now, The Unpleasant Part

Everything I’ve just listed (every one of those five channels) isn’t a channel. It’s a rental property. Each one has a landlord who doesn’t know your name and reserves the right to change the locks without calling first.

Mark Ritson has been making this argument for ten years, and for ten years our industry has quietly assumed it doesn’t apply to us. His position has always been that brand and performance aren’t rival camps, they’re one job, done at two different timescales. That the sixty-forty split between brand investment and performance activation isn’t a slogan, it’s a calculated proportion, backed by data, that lets a business compound instead of just survive. Anyone building purely for the short term is borrowing against a future they haven’t earned yet.

I used to hear that and think: fine, you’ve got a theory, I’ve got an Excel spreadsheet full of performance numbers. The spreadsheet always won the argument.

The Rent I Was Calling A Model

Except the spreadsheet was measuring the wrong thing. It was calculating rent, and I was calling it a model.

Brand is the slower, less flattering work, connecting with an audience directly, building something people talk about without being paid to, generating word of mouth that no platform update can switch off. It’s boring. It doesn’t fit into a weekly report. Nobody’s promising you a number by Friday. But it’s the one line on this entire list that someone else can’t turn off from a control panel you’ll never see.

Look at the market over a long enough window and the pattern is almost insultingly simple. The operators who’ve actually invested in brand grow steadily, year over year, regardless of what any single platform decides to do. Everyone else gets wiped out a little more with every external decision that was never theirs to make.

So yes, Ritson was right, and I was slow to admit it.

Which leaves one question worth asking about your own business, not mine: what percentage of your budget this year went to something you actually own, versus something you’re renting from a landlord who’s never met you? And when he changes the locks (not if, when)  how much of your growth walks out the door with him?