If anyone can now produce the thing, the thing stops being the advantage. Nick Eubanks has a compact way of saying what is left.

Execution Went To Zero. Now What?

“distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite.”

— Nick Eubanks, Digistore24

He immediately qualifies it himself, which is why the line is worth trusting: “But at the same time, I think that’s not entirely true. Cause I think expertise does still allow for some layer of defensibility, at least for now.”

So the honest version is two moats, one of which is eroding. Expertise still defends you; it defends you less each year. Distribution is the one that compounds.

The Distribution Assets Worth Owning

Eubanks has watched the mechanic play out at scale. He describes an SEO business doing “like 50 million a year because the distribution network was just so big” — a checkbox at hosting checkout — and adds, drily, “I don’t think they actually did anything.” The product was not the moat. The placement was.

He has also watched it close in the other direction: as an affiliate, he saw “bottom of funnel keywords where there used to be five or six SEMrush affiliates” become “all SEMrush own media” once the brand built its own distribution.

The assets worth owning are the ones nobody can revoke: an email list, a recurring show with a returning audience, and a community that would notice if you stopped.

Why This Argues For Multi-Channel From Day One

Our reading rather than his. A single-channel business does not own distribution — it rents it, from whichever platform currently sends the traffic, at a price set by someone else.

Multi-channel is not about being everywhere. It is about not being evictable from anywhere that matters. Two or three genuine channels with an owned list behind them beats six thin presences.

Eubanks also notes the unglamorous barrier to entry in distribution businesses: managing fraud at scale, he says, “is a really expensive part of doing it well, but it’s what separates the men from the boys.” Distribution is a moat precisely because maintaining it is tedious.

Building It Before The Client Needs It

The awkward truth about distribution is that it has to be built before it is needed, which means it competes for budget with things that pay back this quarter.

How we handle it: every engagement builds at least one owned asset alongside the campaign work, from the first month, even when it is small. A list of two hundred people who asked to hear from you is worth more in year two than another quarter of rented reach.

See digital marketing in the age of LLMs and holistic visibility across every channel.

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