“Why should I have my own website when there’s [insert social-media sitename here]?”

It’s a popular question that, over the years, has always had the same answer: because then someone else owns it!

Here’s the latest version of the story, this time from a podcast (#235) by Rooster Teeth, the very-successful online production company beginning at the 21 minute 53 second mark.  Fair warning, if you follow the link you may find the language in the podcast quite profane.  Here’s my rough transcript for the section, which begins at roughly the 21:53 minute mark and runs roughly to 24:11.

Well Matt, you’re the CEO for Rooster Teeth, been with the company since the very beginning, you know the value of having your own space on the internet, for the company.
I mean that’s like, the number one thing that we tell people
Yeah.

In all honesty and seriousness … that having your own home is very important online.

You can’t maintain with all the ups and downs and crazy machinations of the wonky internet world we’re in now unless you’ve got your own space
carved out. So I think going out and making your own website? Yes! Do it!

People don’t want to do it now cause they can go to Facebook, they can go make a YouTube channel or whatever.
Promote yourstuff on Reddit or on Twitter.
Yeah.
But you don’t own that!
Someone else owns that!

Well if we’d startd doing that kind of thing back when we first started Rooster Teeth those sites would have been Slashdot — we’d have tried to get
linked on slashdot every day…

Right, and FARK. And MySpace… we’d have had a site on MySpace.
Or Tripod.
Yeah.
Geocities? (laughs)

You know, a big inspiration for Rooster Teeth when we started out we looked at other people who were very successful at the time.
There was a group of guys [Broken Lizard, the producers of an underground hit called Supertroopers.]
So they sold a million copies of their DVD and home video, it made them a huge hit.
Everybody in college had that DVD.
We looked at them and the way that they were marketing themselves and watched what they were doing.

We did that with a lot of people [list] just trying to see what people were doing online.

While we were looking at that, Broken Lizard took their site and turned it off, and just sent everyone to their MySpace page!

Crazy!!!

Seemed like a smart idea probably for them at the time, but then MySpace evaporates essentially four of five years later or turns into a total music
site.
What is MySPace?
Music?
Yeah.
Is it?

And Napster’s for… just for naps. (laughs)

But hey, we really do believe in this — making your own website.

The transcript is mine