You definitely know the feeling. You used to type a question into Google and instantly get a top-notch, relevant answer. Today you have to wade through four sponsored links, an inaccurate AI summary and ten SEO articles full of robotic filler before you find what you’re looking for. Your favorite social network used to show you posts from friends and companies you actually followed. Today it’s just an endless stream of ads and recommended clutter.
This unstoppable decline in quality has an exact name in the digital world: “enshittification” (platform decay). Today, this phenomenon is one of the biggest threats to any B2B company that builds its sales exclusively in someone else’s sandbox. Let’s look at why your favorite sales channels will sooner or later betray you and how to build an escape plan before it’s too late.
The platform life cycle: from subsidized utopia to squeezing everyone dry
The term enshittification precisely describes the economic cycle that every single big platform goes through – from Google, Meta and Amazon all the way to Uber or delivery services. This decay has three relentless phases:
- Phase 1 (subsidizing users): The platform enters the market. Thanks to investor money, it gives everything away for free. Organic reach for businesses is huge, the user experience (UX) is clean and ad-free. Everyone loves it.
- Phase 2 (exploiting users for advertisers): Once users are locked into the platform (the so-called lock-in effect), the platform starts making their experience worse (more ads, selling data) to attract businesses. To you as a B2B advertiser, it offers top-notch targeting and cheap clicks. Businesses move their budgets here en masse.
- Phase 3 (exploiting everyone for shareholders): In the final phase, the platform has locked in advertisers too. You have nowhere else to go. At this point, the platform drastically raises ad prices, shuts off organic reach completely and degrades the user experience to the max, just to squeeze out the last cents for its shareholders. The platform turns into unusable junk.
The end of organic reach and the war on AI spam
We’re watching the consequences of phase three live today. Google is no longer a search engine for information – it’s primarily ad space desperately fighting the endless AI spam we talked about in our previous article. Amazon no longer shows the best products at the top, but the products whose sellers paid the most for a “sponsored position” (even if they’re low quality).
If your B2B company today relies only on organic reach on LinkedIn or cheap conversions from Meta Ads, you’re playing Russian roulette with your own business. You’re just a tenant in someone else’s house. If the landlord (the algorithm) decides tomorrow to raise the rent by 300% or simply kick you out, your marketing channel ceases to exist overnight.
The escape plan: why your own list is a matter of survival
The only defense against enshittification is building what we mentioned in our article on B2B newsletters – an owned audience.
You have to change your perspective. Social networks and search engines should no longer be the place where your business “lives.” They’re just hunting grounds. Your only goal on these platforms is to win attention and move users into your own, controlled ecosystem as quickly as possible.
- Email and SMS: Email is an open protocol. There’s no central company called “Email Inc.” that could cut your organic reach. If you send a newsletter to 10,000 subscribers, whether they read it isn’t decided by one platform’s algorithm but mainly by the quality of your list and your content. It’s an asset you own.
- Your own client portal: We wrote about this in our article on self-serve B2B. If clients buy directly through your website and your own closed portal, you don’t have to pay a third party a tax on every purchase.
Less dependence, higher margins
Platforms will never stop existing, but they’ll keep getting worse and more expensive. Successful B2B companies don’t fight them. They simply use their remaining organic reach to pull as many relevant emails and contacts as possible into their company database. The moment your most important clients and prospects are in your own CRM and you communicate with them directly, platform decay no longer affects you.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
1. Does this mean we should stop advertising on Google or social media altogether?
No, that would be extreme. Keep using them as long as they generate profit (positive ROI). But you have to change the goal of your campaigns. Instead of expensive “Buy now” ads, redirect your budgets to campaigns like “Download our unique market research in exchange for your email.” Use the platform only for the first touch, and run all further stages of the sale in your own channels (email, website, CRM).
2. Isn’t email also at risk now that Google (Gmail) and Apple are starting to block bulk emails?
It’s true that Gmail and Apple are tightening spam protection (e.g., strict requirements for DMARC and SPF records). But if you’ve read our article on the death of the MQL and newsletters, you know your goal isn’t to spam a cold list. If you send valuable content to people who explicitly asked for it, email providers reward you with high deliverability. Spam filters only destroy those who buy lists or pester people.
3. Which platforms are currently most resistant to enshittification?
So far, the most resistant are narrowly specialized community platforms (like Discord, closed Slack groups or GitHub for developers) that work on direct connections without an aggressive algorithmic feed. In the B2B space, LinkedIn still has the best remaining value, but even it is showing strong signs of phase three (aggressive monetization and penalizing external links).
If you want to start building your own contact list and sending emails people actually open, we’ll help you as part of our email marketing service.
