Build the list, not the following
Most artists I know measure their audience by the number of followers they have. The number is visible, it increases, and it feels as though you have built it. I believed that, too, for years — until a company I had never spoken to made a decision about my business and refused to tell me why.
I am in a position to compare the two sides of this. I handle my own sales in the Netherlands through Studio Woudt; for sales abroad, I work with galleries. I have been sending a newsletter since 2012. For years, I also poured work into platforms I did not control, as most of us do. So I have experienced both sides of the same question: who actually holds the connection between me and the people who care about my work?
The door that closed
Three years ago, my personal Facebook account was permanently restricted from creating or managing advertising. Not the business pages, but the person behind them. Everything attached to that account lost the ability to advertise along with it: Studio Woudt, 1605 Collective and 1605 Studio. No message was sent to explain this. I only found out when something stopped working.
This spring, I finally got the case in front of a specialist team at Meta and offered them everything: I provided my passport, chamber of commerce registration, VAT number and full identity verification — whatever they wanted to see. The answer came back within days. The restriction was older than ninety days; restrictions older than ninety days could no longer be contested, and the chat was closed.
When I asked what I had actually done, I found out that it was a handful of rejected advertisements from between 2013 and 2016, made under a business name I no longer use. Boosted posts from nine to thirteen years ago.
There is no appeal process and no one to talk to. The window in which I could have defended myself had expired before I knew it existed.
That is what it means to build on rented ground.
What this is really about
Almost every artist I know is building an audience on a platform that does not belong to them. Most of us only realise what this means when it stops working. We are measuring the wrong thing. The number of followers is not the asset. The ability to reach those followers is the asset, and that ability belongs to someone else who can revoke it at any time without consulting you.
I have been doing this for a long time. The newsletter dates back to 2012 and only moved to Substack in 2024. That’s fourteen years of writing to a list rather than a feed. Last July, I ended my gallery representation in the Netherlands and started running the Dutch market myself. At the time, these felt like separate decisions. In fact, they were one and the same, and I now have enough data to determine their value.
In the rest of this piece, I will compare the value of a following of eighty-three thousand people to that of a list a fraction of that size, including the one figure about my own websites that changed how I run this business. I will explain the distinction it took me years to see between obstacles you can solve and those that have already been decided upon before you knew a decision was being made. I will also tell you exactly what I would do if I were starting again tomorrow, which is not the advice most people give.
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