You own your email list
Posted by Russell Brunson
10 May 2025
Kylie Jenner lost 15 million Instagram followers yesterday.
Not in a year. Not in a month. In a few hours.
Meta executed what’s being called the “Great Purge of 2026” — a platform-wide sweep that wiped bots, inactive accounts, and click-farm followers off Instagram overnight. Kylie wasn’t alone. Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, BLACKPINK, BTS were all hit. Some lost millions. Many lost more than they’d want to admit.
If you’ve ever envied a creator’s follower count… now you know.
A lot of those numbers were never real.
But here’s the part nobody is saying out loud: This isn’t a Kylie Jenner problem. This is an “everyone who built their business on a platform they don’t own” problem. Instagram giveth. Instagram taketh away. Same with TikTok. Same with YouTube. Same with X.
I’ve been saying the same thing for 20 years, and I’ll say it again today: Your list is your business. Everything else is rented. The day Meta decides your account isn’t authentic enough… the day the algorithm changes… the day a bot purge runs… all those followers, all that reach, all that “leverage” can disappear in a few hours.
But your email list? Your phone numbers? Your direct relationships? Nobody can take those from you.
What’s one thing you’ve built that nobody can take away from you?
Build your list before you need it.
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