The question rarely arrives as a question. It arrives as a statement: we already have a profile, isn't that enough? There is sound reasoning behind it, because a profile is set up in an hour while a website costs money and attention. The surveys still paint a clear picture. 79.01 percent of enterprises in the EU had their own website in 2025 (Eurostat), while 63.57 percent used social media in the same year (Eurostat). On the other side of the screen the pattern repeats: 94 percent of people in the EU had used the internet in the previous three months in 2025 (Eurostat), but only 59 percent of people in Germany used social media privately (Federal Statistical Office). This article places both routes side by side, not as a matter of belief but along six criteria: reach, control over visibility, selling, legal duties, effort, and what remains when one channel drops out. The result is a decision aid for your own business, not a recommendation for everyone.
Two channels, one difference in ownership
The first difference is not technical but legal: your own website sits on an address the business owns, a profile sits in somebody else's house.
How widespread each is can be put in figures. 79.01 percent of enterprises in the EU had their own website in 2025 (Eurostat), 63.57 percent used social media (Eurostat). A gap of some fifteen percentage points says it plainly: the website is the norm, the profile the addition. If you want to start with the basic decision, the routes are set out in the comparison of approaches; how a site grows out of a short briefing is shown on How it works.
The obvious objection is that this only holds for large companies. The figures say otherwise. Among small enterprises the share with their own website stood at 76.66 percent in 2025, against 95.65 percent among large enterprises (Eurostat). The gap exists, but it is narrower than the story of a mid-sized sector without a web presence suggests. On social media, small enterprises trail more clearly, at 60.59 percent (Eurostat). And the question concerns practically the whole economy: 99.3 percent of enterprises in Germany counted as small and medium-sized enterprises in 2024 (Federal Statistical Office). That is not a fringe group but the standard case.
Platform use varies widely between sectors. In construction, just under half of the enterprises used social media in 2025, precisely 49.97 percent (Eurostat); in the information and communication sector the figure was 83.15 percent (Eurostat). That is not a verdict on quality but a hint about fit: where a service is visual and photogenic, a profile carries more weight; where it needs explanation and depends on appointments, the own site carries more. For businesses with a local catchment area, the article on local visibility is worth reading alongside this one.
Where customers search, where they spend time
Reach is the most common argument for the profile and at the same time the least well supported.
In the EU, 94 percent of people had used the internet in the previous three months in 2025 (Eurostat), while 67 percent reported participating in social networks (Eurostat). Both values come from the same survey and population, so they are directly comparable. The difference of 27 percentage points describes exactly those people who are reachable online but not through a network.
In Germany the difference is even sharper. 80 percent of people aged 16 to 74 searched online for information about goods and services in 2025 (Federal Statistical Office), while 59 percent used social media privately (Federal Statistical Office). Age structure becomes decisive as soon as the customer base is not young: among people aged 65 to 74, a quarter, that is 25 percent, were active on social media in 2025 (Federal Statistical Office). A business that refits bathrooms, settles estates or arranges care misses three out of four people in that age group if it relies on a profile alone.
Scroll table sideways
| Criterion | Own channel | Third-party channel |
|---|---|---|
| Adoption among EU enterprises | 79.01 percent had their own website in 2025 (Eurostat) | 63.57 percent used social media (Eurostat) |
| Adoption among small enterprises | 76.66 percent with their own website (Eurostat) | 60.59 percent with social media (Eurostat) |
| People reached in the EU | 94 percent had been online within three months (Eurostat) | 67 percent participated in social networks (Eurostat) |
| Reach in Germany | 80 percent searched for goods and services (Federal Statistical Office) | 59 percent used social media privately (Federal Statistical Office) |
| Channel used for online selling | 85.65 percent of selling enterprises used a website or app (Eurostat) | 45 percent used a marketplace (Eurostat) |
| Share of turnover from online selling | 7.08 percent of total turnover (Eurostat) | 1.30 percent of total turnover (Eurostat) |
The own channel is no niche phenomenon. At the end of 2025 there were around 17.7 million domains registered worldwide under the German country code (DENIC). An address of your own is the basis for everything else: a mailbox in your own name, a redirect when you change providers, a search result attributed to the business. If you have taken that step and still are not found, the article on missing visibility lists the usual obstacles.
Visibility: borrowed or owned
A profile is reach on loan. Since the Digital Services Act, providers have had to report every measure against a post or an account, with reasons, to a public database of the European Commission.
What is recorded there says nothing about any single business. It does show the scale on which visibility is decided: continuously, in large numbers and outside the sphere of influence of whoever wrote the affected post.
What weighs more heavily is that a share of those decisions is taken fully automatically. Automated decisions are not wrong as such, but they also catch posts that nobody meant as a breach: a price, a photo from a building site, a term from the trade vocabulary. For a business that is a risk it can neither steer nor insure. On your own site, visibility is decided instead by technology the business holds in its own hands, and in case of doubt by a redirect plan that takes effect during a move.
Renting reach means keeping reach cancellable
What your own site carries
What enterprises actually do on their websites has been surveyed. The most common function is the description of goods and services together with price lists: 66.36 percent of enterprises offered that in 2025 (Eurostat).
This is exactly where a profile falls short, not because the platform forbids it but because the format does not carry it. A service description with variants, boundaries and price ranges is not a post but a page that stays findable for years and is reached from search.
Services and prices
66.36 percent of EU enterprises described goods, services and prices on their own website in 2025 (Eurostat). It is the most used function and the one that pre-sorts an enquiry.
Vacancies and applications
31.34 percent advertised open positions or accepted online applications through the website (Eurostat). If you are hiring, you need a page that is readable without an account at any provider.
More than one language
29.51 percent offered content in at least two languages (Eurostat). The profile format leaves little room for that; on your own site it is a question of structure.
Findable from search
80 percent of people in Germany searched online for information about goods and services in 2025 (Federal Statistical Office). That search ends on pages, not in profiles.
Legal notices in one place
Imprint, privacy notice, right of withdrawal: on your own site they stay permanently reachable. In a profile they hang on a field whose length the provider decides.
Stock instead of stream
A post disappears into the stream, a page stays. For services needed once a year, that is the difference between found and forgotten.
How far to take this depends on the business. An overview of the building blocks is on Features, examples from various sectors on Demos. If you want to fill vacancies, the requirements for a careers page are covered in the article on attracting skilled staff; how to accept applications properly is covered in the article on online applications. For multilingual sites, the article on hreflang and language versions is the starting point.
Selling: the own channel carries the turnover
When it comes to selling over the internet the picture is unambiguous. Among EU enterprises with web sales, 85.65 percent used their own website or app in 2024 and 45 percent used a marketplace (Eurostat).
The two do not exclude each other, but the order is visible: own channel first, third-party platform second. Running only the secondary route means giving up not an extra line of business but the main one.
- Turnover follows the channel. 7.08 percent of total turnover came from web sales via own websites or apps in 2024, 1.30 percent from sales via online marketplaces (Eurostat). The own route therefore carried more than five times as much.
- Not every business needs both. 17.99 percent of EU enterprises conducted their electronic sales using only websites or apps (Eurostat). An own channel on its own is a viable model.
- A shop window is not a shop. If you do not sell online, you can still show products without running an ordering process. The article on showing products without a shop describes the route.
- Prices belong on the page, not in a message. A price posted to a profile sinks into the stream within days. On a page it stands with reference quantity and date, usable in a conversation.
- An enquiry needs a form. Taking enquiries through a profile inbox loses details and any record of them. How a workable form is built is covered in the article on the contact form.
- The numbers stay in your own house. Which page was read how often and where an enquiry came from is measurable on your own site, on third-party platforms only as far as the provider shows it.
The secondary route distributes, the main route holds
Duties apply on both routes
A widespread misconception holds that a profile is legally more harmless than a website. It is not: imprint and privacy obligations attach to the commercial presence, not to the technology behind it.
The difference lies in implementation, because a profile field with a character limit carries a complete imprint poorly. Accessibility, by contrast, comes with a clearly quantified exemption: a microenterprise is one that employs fewer than ten people and that either achieves an annual turnover of at most 2 million euro or whose annual balance sheet total amounts to at most 2 million euro (BFSG Section 2 Number 17). Whether the exemption applies in a given case is set out in the article on microenterprise applicability.
- Keep the imprint permanently reachable. It belongs on its own linked page, not in a profile field whose length the provider decides.
- Align the privacy notice with the processing that actually happens. Form, map service, webfont: whatever is embedded is listed. The article on imprint and privacy policy walks through the points.
- Settle responsibility for incidents. Who reports a data breach, within what deadline, to whom? The article on the 72-hour notification describes the sequence.
- Place accessibility before anyone asks. The microenterprise exemption is tied to headcount, annual turnover and annual balance sheet total (BFSG Section 2 Number 17) and shifts as the business grows.
- File the evidence in order. Consents, processing agreements, deletion deadlines: on your own site the filing can be kept clean, in a profile inbox hardly at all.
For businesses supplying public sector buyers there is another layer. Procurement offices check details that are rarely complete on a profile; the article on public sector contracts names the usual points. And if you want to know how the spending on your own presence is treated in the books, the distinction is set out in the article on website costs as expense or asset.
The calculation without gut feeling
Effort: what an own site asks for today
The strongest argument for the profile is effort, and it is the argument that has aged fastest. Slightly more than half of all websites ran on a content management system in June 2024, precisely 51 percent (Web Almanac 2024).
Running your own website has long since stopped meaning writing code. Where it does go wrong is care in the details: only 66.7 percent of pages in the desktop dataset had a meta description at all (Web Almanac 2024). A third leaves the search result preview to chance, exactly where the click is decided.
- An address of your own that every other presence points to and that travels with you when you change providers.
- One service page per offer rather than one collected page, so that search can return the matching result.
- Title and description maintained per page: only 66.7 percent of pages had a meta description at all (Web Almanac 2024).
- Mobile rendering as the baseline: 94 percent of mobile pages passed the technical viewport check (Web Almanac 2024).
- A robots.txt that is actually served: only 83.9 percent of mobile sites returned a status code 200 for it (Web Almanac 2024).
- A form that collects the details a quote needs, together with a confirmation the customer can keep.
These points are done in a few hours once the structure stands, and they are the reason a page brings enquiries for years while a post drops out of view after a short time. More important than the one-off build is the upkeep: a new service area, a changed price, an additional location. Whoever budgets for that work has compared the effort of profile and site honestly.
How both channels work together
The honest answer to the opening question is rarely either-or. It is this: one channel holds, the other distributes. A profile suits news, photos from the building site and short notes for people who follow the business anyway.
The own site holds services, prices, legal notices, reference cases and the path to an enquiry. In figures: 63.57 percent of EU enterprises used social media in 2025 (Eurostat) and 79.01 percent had their own website (Eurostat). The two channels overlap heavily; arithmetically at least four in ten businesses run both, and the website is the constant. If you want the routes side by side, they are set out in the comparison; to start a conversation there is the contact page.
A profile lends attention. An own site keeps it.
Seven steps to a decision
- Describe your customers, do not guess them. Age, catchment area, occasion. Among people aged 65 to 74, 25 percent were active on social media in 2025 (Federal Statistical Office); that figure decides more than any preference.
- Count the enquiry routes of the last twelve months. Where did the work actually come from? A tally sheet beats any assumption.
- Clarify what the channel has to carry. The service description with prices is the most common website function, offered by 66.36 percent of enterprises (Eurostat), and it is hard to reproduce in a profile format.
- Assign the duties. Imprint, privacy notice and, where applicable, accessibility along the statutory thresholds for headcount, annual turnover and annual balance sheet total (BFSG Section 2 Number 17).
- Fix the selling route. Those who sell online do so overwhelmingly through their own channel: 85.65 percent against 45 percent via marketplaces (Eurostat).
- Budget the effort realistically. Structure, copy, images, legal pages, form. Technology is rarely the bottleneck, with 51 percent of websites running on a content management system in June 2024 (Web Almanac 2024).
- Connect both channels. Every post points to a page, every page names the channel where news appears. That keeps the reach in your own house.
Sources and studies