Wednesday, August 12th, 2026 – 12:35 am
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Build a wall around the right property, and people will line up to get inside. Build one around the wrong property, and eventually you’re the person asking if anyone remembers their AOL password.
Meta is the clean success case. For all the industry’s complaints about opacity, Meta became a walled garden marketers could not ignore because it had daily consumer attention, deep behavioral signals and enough advertising utility to justify the trade-off. People built businesses on the back of that ecosystem. Entire DTC categories grew up inside it.
AOL, meanwhile, is the cautionary tale. It had the eyeballs, the subscriptions, the consumer relationship and the early advantage. Then the internet got bigger, the walls got smaller and “You’ve got mail” became a dated punchline. (I helped to build and protect AOL’s wall for a time. Many lessons learned.)
