You Become The Media When People Know What To Come To You For

I am returning to an idea that I first put into the world in 2013. I have never stopped working on You Are The Media. It has been a mainstay in my life and I have never deviated from what it stands for.

What I have done is adjust it as people, our work and the world around us have changed. 

Does You Are The Media mean the same thing today as it did 13 years ago? Not quite.

In October 2013, YATM was my declaration of independence. I wanted to prove that small businesses could build an audience and encourage people to come directly to them. You didn’t need to rely entirely on someone else’s platform or wait for a gatekeeper/algorithm to decide that your ideas were worth sharing.

Seth Godin said recently, “If you win an auction to get a click, you probably overpaid. Putting attention up for auction is a good business model, for the seller.”

The original YATM message was about taking responsibility for your work and finding a rhythm where you published with the regularity of a magazine. You could build a website and start a newsletter to reach people yourself.

A lot of this came from my experience of never being picked.

I joined networking groups and associations hoping to be seen and regarded as someone worth paying attention to. It never happened, as the power always seemed to belong to someone else who decided who was worthy of the opportunity.

Eventually, I decided to pick myself, even when I didn’t feel ready.

Many small businesses were in the same position. We depended on paid advertising, press coverage and other people’s audiences to be noticed. Someone else controlled the access.

The greatest sense of ownership comes from pressing send to people who have chosen to hear from you. That remains a powerful place to be.

In 2019, I deleted the entire YATM database by mistake. I had to build it again, from scratch, but the people who were there before were still there when I built everything again. This made me realise that you can build a space where people are willing to stay.

The barrier to publishing has now collapsed.

We can all write, record, design and distribute our ideas. AI has reduced the effort further and raised surface-level competence. We can create more, publish faster and sound assured about subjects we have barely experienced.

AI is not the problem, it just makes everything clearer. Our ability to produce content was never going to be our lasting advantage. 

We have all gained the ability to publish whenever we like, but we are not guaranteed attention from anyone. I have learned that access and reach are not the same thing. 

I hold my hand up, I have been guilty of sharing on LinkedIn because I could, rather than because it was useful or had a clear point to it. Publishing more does not bring people closer.

This makes lived experience, judgement and human response more valuable. I do not want to create endless versions of myself to appear everywhere. I would rather be recognisable in the right places and be present when someone reaches out. That response comes from experience and a genuine relationship, not simply from a prompt.

The question today is not, ‘how much can I publish’ but ‘why would anyone return?’

YATM progressed from sharing content to finding ways for people to participate.

What is true from 2013 to today is that publishing helped me become visible. Returning to similar problems made my work familiar and useful. Giving people ways to join in made the whole effort bigger than me.

Today, much of my thinking is centred on the idea that people should not have to carry the full weight of their work alone. We need other people on our side. 

Starting a podcast, newsletter or video series will not create that connection if you have no idea who it is for, why you’re doing it or why they might come back. We cannot rely on publishing to an anonymous audience and expect relationships to appear.

The north star is to build something people can take part in.

Our first YATM Lunch Club in 2016 was not part of a community-building master plan. I simply wanted to meet newsletter subscribers who lived close enough to attend. The weekly newsletter had created familiarity between us. Lunch Club gave people the opportunity to step into the same room and meet one another.

I loved this idea of bringing subscribers together. People could connect, build relationships and start feeling part of something. Over the following years, people hosted, taught, collaborated, shared ideas and contributed themselves.

The first clear sign of a shared identity came in 2019, when Sue Pilgrim described herself as a “YATMer.” It was not a name I had asked anyone to use. Someone else had recognised an identity and chosen to belong to it. That was when I realised YATM belonged partly to other people.

Publishing alone could never have created what exists today. AI can help us make the work, but it cannot replace the relationships people form with one another.

From 2013 to today, being the media is not about what you send. It is about what happens between people because you sent it.

In 2026, being the media means earning a clear and useful place in the lives of a group of people.

Earned relevance is not something you claim, it’s an expectation someone else has because of you. When your name appears, people understand why your ideas might matter to them. They know the problem you stay close to, the perspective you bring and the support they can expect. 

Relevance makes someone think, ‘this is for me.’ It means that you keep coming back to a central idea that connects with people, so they trust what you stand for. This means they reply, attend, commit, tell others and most importantly, return. 

When YATM started, it was about helping people move from dependence on others to independence on themselves and what they can achieve. 

YATM today is about what comes next, moving from independence to interdependence. 

Independence means you do not need permission from anyone else for you to step forward and say ‘ I am here!’ Interdependence means recognising that our most impactful work is rarely built alone. The people alongside us help us test ideas, speak with greater confidence, find opportunities and create something we could never deliver by ourselves.

This is why the YATM mantra of ‘more together’ has meaning today. 

The most developed form of small business media does not create a relationship between publisher and reader. It’s helping people recognise, support and learn from each other.  

This can mean attending an event together, raising awareness of someone else’s work, collaborating on a project or simply knowing that people are rallying for you.

We can achieve more when other people are on our side.

13 years ago, YATM was an invitation to stop waiting for permission and to choose yourself. It still is, but permission is not the difficult part. 

The harder work is how you earn a place in someone’s week, work and world. 

Access helps us be seen. Relevance helps people return. Interdependence is what makes them want to take part.

The goal is not to appear in another channel. It is to build a place of return. Somewhere people understand, value, want to join and would notice if it disappeared.

That is what YATM means today: not another channel, but a place of return.