MAY 5, 2026

PUBLISHER INSIDER

After a brutal April, the publishing market is starting to recover - fast. What we've been saying for two weeks now is coming true (as always!). Revenue, views and RPMs across the market, and anecdotally, are all trending in the right direction. If you're not starting to see a recovery in your assets this month, you may have a strategy or execution issue.

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🚨 INSIDER ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

Views, engagement and revenue trending up - fast. The May recovery is here. Right on schedule, just as we called it.

Inside our private WhatsApp communites, the reports started coming in within hours of the calendar flip. One operator: first post in May reached record high views and record high revenue, with the rest of his content performing well too. Another publisher running multiple pages: reach and earnings improving across the portfolio. These are not isolated cases. This is the Q2 seasonal lift compounding with the Mother's Day demand cluster, both arriving on time.

Here is the macro picture. Q2 ad budgets are now fully unlocked and deployed. The April reporting layer issue has been resolved, so the views you generate are now being counted properly (some pages are still receiving private notifications about retroactive corrections, which means earned revenue is being recovered after the fact). Mother's Day spend in the US runs from late April through May 10, with retail, jewelry, and CPG advertisers all bidding aggressively for adult female impressions. Health and wellness, lifestyle, and parenting niches are catching the strongest tailwind.

The RPM expansion we forecasted is showing up at the page level right now. Pages that held their posting cadence through the soft April are now collecting the upside on inventory that was building audience without paying out. That is the textbook publisher position: accumulate views in the down cycle, monetize them in the up cycle.

What this means for the next 60 days. May and June are setup months for the Q3 ramp, when back-to-school spend layers on top of summer travel and DTC. If you are seeing the recovery on your dashboard, do not pull back on production. The publishers who scale through May are the ones positioned to capture Q3 RPMs at the higher base. If your numbers are not moving yet, audit your posting frequency and content mix against the niches catching tailwind right now.

The reporting glitch is behind us. The seasonal cycle is in your favor. Payouts are climbing. The market called the bottom in April, and May is delivering the proof. Unless something horrible happens in the markets happens in the coming weeks (never say never 🥲), publishers should be mostly out of the dog house.

Stay positioned. The next leg up is just getting started.

​Build a volatility-proof Facebook publishing enterprise with our Elite Facebook Consulting program​

📈 CHART OF THE WEEK

ChatGPT is losing the AI traffic war. Gemini and Claude are cashing in.

Similarweb's data through March 2026 is clean. ChatGPT held roughly 75% of global Gen AI website traffic in April 2025. Twelve months later, it sits at 55%. A 20-point drop, roughly a quarter of its position erased in a year. Gemini absorbed most of it, climbing from 7-8% to 25%. Claude is the second-biggest winner, growing from a sliver to 6-8%. DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, and Copilot fill out the rest.

What this means for your GEO strategy.

The one-LLM era is over. Until recently, optimizing for AI citation meant optimizing for ChatGPT, and you could capture most of the upside on a single platform. With Gemini at 25% share and Claude now a real second-tier force, single-platform GEO leaves 30-40% of the opportunity uncovered.

Two action items.

First, your GEO audits need to test citation coverage across at least three platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Different LLMs index different sources and weight different signals. A page cited on ChatGPT but invisible on Gemini is half-optimized.

Second, prioritize the signals Gemini specifically rewards. Google's AI pulls from structured data, original research, expert attribution, and authoritative entity recognition. The same playbook that won the March 2026 Google Core Update wins inside Gemini, because they share the same retrieval layer. Original data and first-hand expertise compound across both surfaces.

Build for the fragmented stack now, before the publishers ahead of you finish locking it in.

​Build a Google Discover traffic machine in-house with our Google Discover Consulting program​

💬 FROM THE COMMUNITY

🚨 FACEBOOK SCAM ALERT: A lot of operators are falling for this one.

Here's why this one is dangerous. The copy is engineered to bypass your scam filter. No spelling errors. No promises of free money. It uses Meta's real program names and frames the message as exclusivity, not opportunity. The attacker is selling status, not a deal.

That's exactly what real Meta outreach sounds like.

The trap: tap the button, land on a fake login page identical to Facebook's, enter your credentials and 2FA. Within minutes your pages are transferred to a Business Manager you don't control and your Content Monetization payouts rerouted. For a publisher doing five figures a month, that's six figures a year evaporating to a phishing form.

​
The rule: Meta does not DM you for partner programs.

​
Real Agency Partner, Creator Fast Track, and Content Monetization outreach routes through your Business Manager dashboard or your registered email. Never an unsolicited Page message. Never a button that takes you off-platform.

Protect the asset. The macro tailwind on Facebook RPMs we've been calling for May only matters if you still own the pages when the rate ramp hits.

​J​oin the best publishers in the world in our private Whatsapp community​

🗞️ MORE NEWS STORIES

→ Meta's Daily Users Slipped in Q1. Revenue Climbed 33% Anyway.​

Meta posted its first decline in daily active users since 2021, only the second drop in the company's history. Daily active people across the family of apps came in at 3.56 billion for Q1 2026, down slightly from 3.58 billion in Q4 2025. Meta attributed the dip to internet disruptions in Iran, Russia's WhatsApp ban, and likely fallout from Australia's new teen social media restrictions. None of those are organic engagement problems. The rest of the report is where the real story sits. Revenue hit $56.31 billion for the quarter, up 33% year over year. Ad impressions across Meta's apps rose 19%, and the average ad price climbed 12%. Costs jumped 35% as Meta keeps pouring money into AI infrastructure, which means the company has every reason to push harder on monetization. More ads in more places at higher prices is the playbook. For Facebook publishers, that translates to higher RPMs and a platform actively raising the floor on what each piece of content earns. 3.56 billion daily users still represents more than a third of the world's population logging in every day. The audience is there. The monetization machine is accelerating. Publishers positioned on Facebook now are sitting in front of the right wave.

→ Global Social Media Use Peaked in 2022. North America Is the Outlier Still Growing.​

Daily social media consumption across the developed world has fallen about 10% from a 2022 peak of ~2.5 hours per day to ~2.3, according to GWI's tracking of 250,000 adults across 50+ countries. Every age bracket pulled back, with 16 to 24 year olds posting the sharpest drop. The exception is North America, where consumption keeps climbing and now sits roughly 15% above European levels with no plateau in sight. The split matters because North America is also the highest-CPM market on the planet. Watch time per user is rising in the exact geography where each hour of attention is worth the most. AI is the second force reshaping the field. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan disclosed in his 2026 letter that more than 1 million channels used YouTube's AI creation tools daily in December, and 9 of the top 100 fastest-growing YouTube channels globally are entirely AI-generated. The same supply curve is hitting Facebook Reels through Meta's new AI video generator. For Facebook publishers, the read is clear. North American attention is still up for grabs, the dollar value of that attention is rising, and AI-assisted production is now the edge that lets a small operator match the output of a full studio. The publishers stacking both at once are positioned to pull ahead before the field catches up.

→ Instagram Tightens the Screws on Aggregators With New Re-Post Penalties.​

Instagram is testing a feature called Swap that lets users replace the text on someone else's Reel with their own. An explainer article surfaced in the app's Help Center over the weekend, then disappeared, signaling the feature is still in development. The timing is notable. Last week Instagram rolled out new penalties on aggregator accounts, cutting the reach of re-posted and duplicate content across photos, carousels, and Reels at the account level on a rolling 30-day basis. Accounts that primarily post unoriginal work without adding meaningful creative input will see lower distribution, and they regain eligibility once most of their recent posts are considered original within the 30-day window. The story behind the story: Instagram is repositioning itself as the original-content platform, which means a wave of curation-based portfolios on IG just had their distribution multiples compressed overnight. For Facebook publishers, the read is that the originality bar is rising across Meta's surfaces, and the operators investing in genuine first-party content now will compound an advantage as the same logic eventually crosses over.

​Estimate your Facebook pages' potential revenue with our Industry-based Facebook Revenue Calculator​

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