You hear it first in the numbers.
Then you hear it in the street.
They tell you the numbers are truth. They wear the numbers like armor: blue bars, red arrows, lines that climb and fall across a white screen. They call it Analytics. They call it Insight. They call it Truth.
But sometimes the numbers lie.
And the world is changing.
The men in the glass towers own both the road and the signposts now. Google and YouTube are brothers under the same parent, a quiet giant that counts the money while the children fight for your attention. One sells search. The other sells eyes and ears. Both sell you to the highest bidder. They mark your footsteps, your clicks, your hesitations. Then they tell you what those footsteps meant.
They keep their own score.
You are given dashboards, bright as slot machines. Your traffic is "up," your views are "down," your watch time is "healthy," your audience "engaged." But when you bring in a second pair of eyes, some third-party tracker, some independent log, you see another story scratched in the margins. The numbers do not quite match. The curves bend a different way. What was supposed to be a mirror starts to look like a painting.
When the world moves onto platforms, the platforms become the weather. They decide who gets the sun and who lives in the shade.
And when the weather lies, wise men stop planting in that soil.
A man who has walked long roads learns to distrust easy maps.
You invest in your own tools. You count your own visitors, your own orders, your own sales. The third-party analytics, clumsy, imperfect, but yours, show one thing; the platform’s polished report shows another. The ad dashboards give themselves the glory twice over. One sale, three platforms claiming credit, each boasting louder than the others. View-through here, last-click there, data-driven somewhere else. It is not a crime, they say. It is only attribution. It is only a model.
And it is true that some of the gaps are born of the times. Privacy rules close old doors. Devices hide more of their tracks. Different models count different touchpoints and windows, so GA4 and the ad platforms disagree, sometimes by a long shot. A little disagreement is the cost of doing business in a broken mirror.
But when every man at the table tells you he alone paid for the drinks, you start to check the bill yourself.
You run your own logs. You compare them. When the story does not match and the platform shrugs, you move your money.
Trust is a slow river. It takes years to carve its bed, and one landslide to dam it.
Unethical behavior – black-box models, self-serving attribution, numbers that cannot be traced back to clear methods – chips at that riverbank. For a time, the water still flows the old way. Users stay because leaving is hard. They have money, history, habits sunk into the platform. There are switching costs: the fear of lost reach, the learning of new tools, the ties to teams and reps they already know.
But even a trapped animal will chew through its own leg when it realizes the trap is not an accident but a design.
There is a window for regret. It does not stay open long.
Then the word on the street changes.
At first it is a murmur in small rooms. A message between two tired men who both bought the same lie. They say, "Your numbers do not match either?" and they both laugh without humor. The word on the street is the rumor that slips out of the dashboards and into the air, carried from mouth to mouth until it grows teeth.
Then you start to hear another word: glow up.
Glow up is what they say when something or someone changes in a way you cannot ignore any more. It is the before-and-after picture that makes you rub your eyes. It is the platform that stopped cheating and started showing its math. It is the creator who finally walked away from cooked numbers and built something of their own.
One day you step out into the street and you feel it on your skin. Horns honk. A driver leans out and shouts your name. People who used to walk past you without a glance now nod, raise a hand, call out. They talk about the one who left the rigged game and still won. They talk about the one who did not take the numbers on faith. They talk about you.
That is another kind of analytics. No charts. Just the sound of your name traveling faster than the lie.
Somewhere in a boardroom, a man in a clean shirt will say, "They will never leave. We are too big. We are the default." And the room will nod, because the charts point up and the cash flows in and the regulators talk more than they move.
They forget what every old fisherman knows: the sea is patient, but it is not loyal.
If you lie to people long enough about where their catch is going, about how many fish swim beneath their boat, they will stop sailing your channel. They will find another harbor, one run by quieter men who count honestly. Or they will build their own harbor from the ground up, plank by plank, so that no one else can siphon their tide.
The first law of any platform should be simple: do not insult the intelligence of the people who feed you.
You can make mistakes. You can have bugs, limits, blind spots. You can admit that some conversions will never be perfectly attributed, that no model sees the whole journey. But when you hide those gaps, when you coat them in language and PR until even you cannot see the truth anymore, you are no longer mistaken, you are untrustworthy.
And once trust breaks, no amount of "engagement" can glue it back.
You say this: they know who I am.
You are not a row in their database. You are the crack in their story. You are the creator, the advertiser, the publisher who ran your own numbers and saw the gap, who realized the house always wins because the house writes the rulebook and keeps the dice.
You are also the one the street talks about now. The glow up in real life, not in filters and captions. The one who stopped believing the platform when the platform stopped deserving it. The one who walked out and did not vanish.
Behind the charts are humans – engineers, managers, executives – who have a choice, even now.
Be part of the solution, or be part of the problem and be replaced.
The choice is not yours. It is theirs. Your choice is simpler and harder: whom to reward.
We live in a time when people mutter at their screens that "all platforms are the same," yet still pour their work and money into the very machines they no longer trust, because the cost of switching feels too high. This is how empires grow fat and careless. This is how they fall, too.
The quiet revolution is not in angry posts or shouted threats. It is in the slow, deliberate redirection of attention and dollars. You stop feeding what lies to you. You start feeding what tells you the truth, even when the truth is smaller, rougher, less convenient.
You reward the platforms that:
– Show their math.
– Explain their models and admit their limits.
– Let independent checks confirm or challenge their numbers.
– Do not count the same victory twice and claim it as three.
You starve check here the ones that treat trust as a bottomless well, forever refilling no matter how many times they poison it.
There is a window.
For a time, the giants can say, "We did not know," and it will be half true. For a time, they can say, "The world is changing – privacy laws, devices, tracking methods, attribution models," and it will be true enough. But the day comes when they know exactly what they are doing and what they are hiding. After that, every decision is a choice between cleaning the glass and painting it darker.
That window is closing fast.
This is the message, whether anyone in the glass towers reads it or not: people are watching their own numbers now. They are learning that no single tool offers the full truth, least of all one that profits from the story it tells. They are talking to each other, comparing dashboards, comparing logs, taking notes. The word on the street has changed from doubt to certainty.
The world is changing.
When platforms lie about your traffic, they will say it is only a small thing, a rounding error, a technicality. But in the end it is never just about the traffic. It is about whether you can believe the ground under your feet.
If you cannot, you move.
And when enough people move, there is a glow up you can hear before you see: the honk of horns, the cheering of your name, the sound of giants learning an old, hard truth the writers knew by heart:
nothing is too big to be replaced.
May peace be with you, in every step you take and every song that rises from your heart.
With gratitude and quiet strength,
Roy Dawson
Earth Angel Master Magical Healer
Singer, Songwriter, Poet