I built a top 5 website in Pakistan. Then Facebook took it back.

For the first two months, nobody came.

I had built Javedch.com myself, on WordPress, which I’d taught myself from forums. The plan was humble: put my father’s newspaper columns online. The columns were good. The site worked. The visitor count barely moved.

The fix wasn’t better content

It was going where people already were. We started sharing on my father’s Facebook page, and the traffic didn’t grow, it flooded. I got greedy in the right way: I applied to Facebook’s developer conference (and got invited three times), and we tested Instant Articles before most publishers in the country had heard of them. That turned into real revenue.

One site became a network

• Javedch.com for columns and news
• Baat TV for video
• Icons for entertainment
• Politix for English readers
• NewsToday, plus a set of Facebook pages feeding all of it

I started alone, hired two classmates, and ended up running a 30-person newsroom. At the peak, Javedch.com ranked in Pakistan’s top 5 on Alexa.

Then the landlord changed the locks

Facebook rewrote its news feed algorithm, and most of our traffic disappeared. Not over a year. Practically overnight. The site survived, and it is still live and publishing every day. But that was the most expensive lesson of my career:

An audience you don’t own isn’t yours.

It’s why you’re reading this on my own domain, and why there’s a newsletter at the bottom of every page.