The Grift of Audience Growth: 2026 Edition

It’s 2026, and somehow, your feed is still full of people telling you that all you need to do is create a course, a membership, or a low-ticket offer, and the money will pour in. What they don’t tell you is that if you don’t have an audience, none of it will work. Guess what, audience building is 10x harder in 2026.

We covered the grift of audience growth back in 2023. And we’re back to tell you: the lie hasn’t changed. But everything around it has gotten dramatically worse, structurally. Let’s do it.

About 35 episodes ago — back in 2023 — we did an episode called The Grift of Audience Growth. The core argument was simple: every program being sold in the online business space requires a real audience to work. And the programs selling you on courses, memberships, and group programs were lying to you about that.

We did the math then, and we want to do it again because nothing about it has changed. These offers all convert at roughly 1%. For every 100 people on your email list, you will sell one thing. Want to make $100,000 a year selling a $1,000 offer? You need 10,000 people on your list.

The math doesn’t math. It never has. And yet the “no audience, no problem” crowd is still selling the dream, and now there are even more ways to sell you on it —

The Lie Hasn’t Changed, But The Product Line Exploded

What’s changed is the sheer number of products being sold with the same broken promise attached. Courses. Memberships. Templates and PDF farms. Low-ticket offers. And now we’ve arrived at two brand new frontiers that take the grift to a whole new level.

The first is vibe-coded apps. Vibe coding uses AI tools to build software without traditional programming skills. You describe what you want, the AI writes the code, and in theory, you have an app. The pitch: “Take your program content, yay, you’re now a SAAS company.

With an app built on a vibe-coding platform, you have no idea if it has real utility, whether it’s secure, whether there is support, or whether it’ll exist in six months. It could be a basic prototype with a Stripe checkout slapped on it. The barrier to appearing as if you have something valuable has completely collapsed.

The second new frontier is even more brazen: use AI to create your product, build your funnel, and run your ads. No expertise required. No actual knowledge of the thing you’re selling. Just prompt your way to passive income. Think of it as the new Master Resell Rights — except instead of buying someone else’s product to resell as your own, you’re getting AI to generate the product for you. Same scam.

Audience Growth is Exponentially Harder in 2026

Whenever someone is selling one of these types of programs, Maggie and I Voxer each other and ask the same question:

“What’s missing here?” The missing ingredient is the truth about how big an audience you need to be profitable selling memberships, courses, and low-ticket offers.

Even when they do address the elephant in the room about audience size, it’s the same refrain: No audience. No Problem. The environment you’re being asked to build an audience in has fundamentally changed.

The first is the platforms themselves. According to Social Insider’s 2026 benchmarks — based on analysis of 70 million posts — Instagram engagement is in consistent decline, dropping from 0.52% in Q1 2025 to 0.45% in Q1 2026. Facebook is flat at a dismal 0.15%. And even TikTok — the one platform where overall engagement is actually up — saw comments per post drop 24% year over year.

People are watching more and engaging less. The passive scroll has replaced the actual interaction.

Let’s put that in real terms. A 0.15% engagement rate on Facebook means that for every 1,000 people who see your post, one and a half of them will actually do anything — a like, a comment, a share. Not even two people. One and a half. That is the platform they want you to build your audience on.

Vulture just published a deep investigation into what they’re calling “clipping” — and it is a must-read. Here’s the core of it: companies are operating tens of thousands of dummy social media accounts posting sponsored content designed to look like organic enthusiasm from real users.

One operator ran 65,000 fake accounts posting 50,000 videos a day across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X — all for paying clients. The primary tactic is to take content — a song, a trailer, a podcast clip — chop it into short videos, and flood the platforms with it until the algorithm mistakes the volume for genuine interest and pushes it to real users. They call it “trend simulation.” The motto of one agency: “Everything on the internet is fake.”

And it’s not just niche artists. The investigation found paid clipping campaigns for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, Justin Bieber’s Coachella performances, major Netflix releases, and consumer brands.

So when someone tells you “just post consistently, and the algorithm will reward you” — they are asking you to compete, organically, against 65,000 fake accounts posting 50,000 videos a day. “Post consistently” is advice from an era when humans were actually on the other end of the feed.

The second thing that makes growing an audience tough is that we are all exhausted. Attention is the currency of audience growth, and 2026 is strip-mining it. The news cycle is relentless. Economic anxiety is real. Your potential audience is depleted before they ever see your post.

And here’s the cruel irony: economic uncertainty makes the “no audience no problem” pitch more seductive, not less. When people are anxious and desperate, they buy programs that promise a path forward. They seek certainty and are more likely to fall victim to scams.

The Grift Inside the Grift

And who is making money from these programs right now? The people teaching how to use AI to create your funnel, or just create a low-ticket offer or courses.

Their business model IS teaching the thing to an audience of people who want to learn the thing. It’s circular. It’s self-sealing. If the only proof that their strategy works is their own follower count — built on an audience of other people trying to grow audiences — that is Online Business Inception that we talked about on the show before, not evidence that it will work for your actual business.

The punchline: they are marketing programs that promise sales on autopilot without facing the reality of how hard it is to grow an audience now. When engagement numbers are in the toilet, AI-generated content is everywhere, targeting an overwhelmed, depleted audience to sell you a program that requires an audience you’ll struggle to build right now.

And when it doesn’t work, the responsibility will shift to you. You didn’t implement. You weren’t consistent. You had a mindset block.

That is the grift. Same as it was in 2023. Just louder. And the conditions are worse.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

Let’s talk about what you can actually do with all of this.

The math still has to math. Before buying any program, course, membership, template, low-ticket offer, vibe-coded app, doesn’t matter — run the numbers for your specific price point. How many do you need to sell to hit your revenue goal? Add two zeros. That’s the list size you need. Does that feel realistic given where you’re starting?
Ask when their results are from. First mover advantage is real. A list-building strategy that worked in 2015 or even 2021 is not the same strategy in 2026. If they can’t tell you when their success happened and what the conditions were, that’s a red flag.
Look at who the success stories actually are. Are they people in your niche, starting from where you’re starting, in the current environment? Or are they people who built audiences when the platforms worked differently — and are now teaching from that vantage point?
The new product does not change the math. Low-ticket offers, templates, vibe-coded apps — these are not loopholes in the audience requirement. At lower price points, you need more buyers, not fewer. Don’t let the price point’s accessibility distract you from the math problem underneath.