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In today’s issue: why Google, YouTube, and Facebook are the only three platforms your publishing strategy should be built around, what Meta’s subsea cable tells us about AI infrastructure, and three posts worth studying.

The Only Three Sites That Matter for Your Publishing Strategy

Google, YouTube, and Facebook are the three biggest and most important sites on the planet. If your publishing strategy is not built around all three, you are leaving the majority of available attention on the table.

There is something that sounds obvious but that most publishers still get wrong. The three most visited websites in the world right now are Google, YouTube, and Facebook, in that order. Google pulls in over 100 billion monthly visits. YouTube sits around 55 billion. Facebook clocks roughly 10 billion. Nobody else is close. These three platforms are where the overwhelming majority of human attention lives online, and they should be the crux of every serious publishing strategy.

Yet most publishers scatter themselves across a dozen platforms chasing whatever is trending that quarter. Threads, Bluesky, TikTok, newsletters, podcasts. None of those are bad. But treating them as primary channels before you have Google, YouTube, and Facebook locked down is putting the cart before the horse. The big three are where the traffic is, where the monetization infrastructure exists, and where your content has the longest shelf life.

Here is how to think about sequencing, because the order matters:

1. Start with Facebook. Facebook will give you the fastest and most consistent return of the three. The feedback loop is tight. You post, you see engagement within hours, you learn what works, and you can iterate the same day. Content monetization is live and paying out. Referral traffic is rebounding in 2026 after years of decline. For a publisher who needs to start generating results now, Facebook is the proving ground. It funds the operation while you build out the other two.

2. Layer in Google. Google is the largest site on earth, but it rewards patience and consistency. Discover can send massive traffic spikes, and Search delivers compounding returns over months as your content library grows. The upside is enormous, but the ramp is slower and the rules keep shifting. Google is a medium-term play that accelerates once you have enough indexed content to trigger algorithmic trust.

3. Build YouTube last, because it is the heaviest lift. YouTube is typically the hardest of the three to get moving. The first six to twelve months are brutal. You are producing video, which costs more time and money per piece than any other format, and the algorithm needs dozens of uploads before it even knows what to do with your channel. Growth on YouTube is exponential, not linear, which means it looks like nothing is happening until suddenly it is. But once a YouTube channel catches, it compounds in a way the other two platforms cannot match, because every video you have ever published keeps working for you.

The mistake is trying to do all three at once with equal effort from day one. The smart play is to dominate Facebook first because it pays you back the fastest, use that momentum and revenue to fund your Google content operation, and then roll YouTube in once you have the resources and the patience to sustain it through the slow early months.

Every other platform is a nice-to-have. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are the three pillars. If you are not building your entire publishing business around them, you are optimizing the margins while ignoring the center of gravity.

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