Your Distribution Is a Concentrated Position

My entire media operation costs about thirty-six dollars a month. The invoice is not where the risk is — the exposure sits in the lines I never sized: discovery, ranking, and search.

By

Ken Morico

My entire media operation costs about thirty-six dollars a month. Two live websites, a 527-person email list, a LinkedIn newsletter, and years of archives.

The invoice is not where the risk is.

In 2016, kenmorico.com did about 300 visitors a day. Today it does a fraction of that. Nobody took the site. No account was suspended. No policy changed that I could have read in advance. I still own the domain, the hosting, and every word in the archive.

I owned the asset the whole time. Google just stopped sending people to it.

Here is what I had actually done, in language I should have recognized twenty years sooner. I had put one hundred percent of my discovery into a single position, held it for a decade, and never once looked at the allocation.

You would not run a portfolio that way. Below is my full invoice, line by line, and the position sizing I now run against it.

The invoice

Vercel hosting for kenmorico.com and moricomedia.com: $0 Domains through Squarespace, four of them: $80 per year Substack, including all email delivery to 527 subscribers: $0 LinkedIn, including the Forge Notes newsletter to 129 subscribers: $0 Buffer for scheduling: $0 Google Workspace for business email: $9 per month Claude Pro: $20 per month

That is the whole thing. Now look at which lines are free.

Hosting, free. Email delivery, free. Scheduling, free. Distribution, free.

Everything I do not pay for is a position I never sized. It does not appear in the accounting, so it never gets reviewed.

Not all of it is dangerous. Vercel is free and I could move both sites to another host this afternoon. The exposure sits in the lines I could not rebuild anywhere else: the network that recommends me, the feed that ranks me, and the search engine that used to send me strangers.

You can own the asset and still be exposed

Back to the traffic. Some of that decline is ten years of drift and my own neglect of the property. The recent leg down is not ambiguous. Search results answer the question on the results page now. The click resolves before it ever leaves Google.

I owned the asset outright. My access to the audience for it ran through one counterparty.

Owning the thing and owning the route to buyers are two separate positions. Only one of them was ever mine, and I had them filed as the same line.

Where my audience actually sits

Run the allocation honestly.

527 email addresses. Mine. I can reach all 527 tomorrow morning without asking anyone. Held directly.

129 LinkedIn subscribers. Not mine. No addresses, no export, and how many of them see any given issue is decided by a system with no visibility and no appeal. Held by a custodian who can change the terms.

Search visitors. Formerly about 300 a day, now a fraction. Never mine at any point. That position went to near zero without a single notification.

Two of those three lines are somebody else's to revalue. That is the real allocation, and none of it appears in the thirty-six dollars.

So why keep the site

Because pageviews were never the thing I wanted. They were a proxy for the thing I wanted, which was my framing of a problem landing in front of people deciding about it. The proxy broke. The thing did not.

The site does three jobs and only one ever depended on traffic.

Home base. Every rented channel points at a destination I control. The routes move. The destination does not.

Archive. Years of work, indexed, mine, still loading whether or not anyone showed up today. An archive compounds. A feed post is unfindable within a day, including by you.

And the job most people are missing: the archive is read by machines.

The same shift that killed the click made the open web the input layer. Ask an AI system about something I have written about and the answer gets assembled out of sources. An indexed archive on a domain you control is a source. A post behind a login is not.

The click is gone. Being the source replaced it. You get no pageview for that, and it is considerably harder to take away.

You cannot measure this well, and anyone selling you a dashboard for it is guessing. But publishing only in places where nothing can read you is a strange allocation to hold right now.

Size the position

The question is not "do I own this." It is what this is worth on the day the counterparty changes the terms and gives me no notice.

Full control: domains, site, archive, and the subscriber list as a file of email addresses. All of it still there if every platform went dark tonight.

Recoverable: email delivery. If Substack closed my account this afternoon I keep the list. I lose the sending infrastructure, and the reader relationship goes quiet until I stand up a direct platform. That cost is measured in days, not dollars.

Total loss: discovery. The Substack network, the LinkedIn feed, search traffic. None of it is mine. You cannot export a recommendation engine.

Most people audit the first line, which is usually already fine, and never look at the third, where the entire exposure lives.

The position I hold on purpose

I publish on Substack and LinkedIn. Both are concentrated, and both are somebody else's.

I do it for discovery. Substack puts my writing in front of people who have never heard of me, and no amount of owning my own infrastructure replicates that. Distribution is the one thing you cannot self-host.

So the concentration is deliberate. I take the exposure and I hedge it. Every subscriber Substack sends me becomes a name I hold directly, off platform, in a form I can take with me.

The hedge is one boring detail. I export the list every quarter and keep my own copy. Without it I am not running a position, I am just exposed.

Quarterly is not perfect. On a bad day I lose up to ninety days of new names, and I know it. But quarterly runs whether or not I am paying attention, and a hedge with a known gap beats an intention with none.

The standard is not whether you could export. It is whether the export happens when you are busy.

The test

Ownership is not measured in what you paid for. It is measured in what survives a repricing you did not get to vote on.

Size your positions. Be unkind about it. Most people find that the thing they were proudest of owning was never the exposure, and the line costing them nothing was carrying the whole business.

Concentration is not a problem until it is the only problem.

— Ken

Systems over hype. Own the asset, not the audience.

If you want this applied to your own operation, the 1:1 Strategy Session is one hour, a prioritized plan, and a recording. Details at kenmorico.com/coaching.