📥 Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!
We are committed to transparency, so here is the progress the team made across key areas.
Lead Magnet Work
• New PDA and PPWP Mailchimp lead magnet flows built and tested.
• Thank You pages created and connected to updated customer journeys.
• Temporary download links added to ensure users can re-enter flows.
UI and Front-End
• Logo carousel deployed to main PPWP pages including Home, Pricing, Docs, and Extensions.
• Layout versions tested for improved readability on PPWP.
Customer Success Highlights
• Multiple custom code snippets created for customer use cases.
• Support team helped troubleshoot activation issues and presale demo scenarios.
• Customer satisfaction increased, and several review requests were sent.
More improvements coming soon.
The Algorithm Won. Creators Stopped Posting.
Global social media use is falling. Time spent peaked in 2022 and has already declined nearly ten percent, based on GWI data from more than two hundred thousand adults. Teenagers and young adults once fuelled these platforms. Now they are quietly backing away.
Even with the drop, people still spend more than two hours a day on social apps. But the purpose has shifted. Using social media to talk, express yourself, or meet new people is down. Opening the apps simply to pass time is up. These networks feel less like places to share and more like background noise.
Ten years ago the feeds were messy and human. Today those voices are silent. Younger users moved into a mode of consuming without creating. One awkward post can follow them forever and the algorithm barely shows their updates to friends anyway. So they scroll instead of speak.
They have become ghost participants. They watch stories, swipe feeds, and rarely interact. They know everything happening online but leave almost no trace.
A system built for engagement, not people
Half of all web traffic in 2023 came from bots. Feeds no longer show your friends. They show whatever keeps people scrolling. Influencers, brands, personalised recommendations. The platforms optimise for attention, not connection.
This is where the economics flip.
Creators and businesses still rely on platforms where reach is rented. They do not own their audience. They cannot export followers. One algorithm change and visibility disappears overnight.
Owned infrastructure is the alternative. Email lists you control. Direct communication without filters. Membership platforms that protect recurring revenue. These keep working even when the platforms change the rules.
The drop in posting mirrors the drop in creator control. Both point to the same reality: platforms reward passive consumption and punish anyone who tries to build on top of them.
Younger users already understand that visibility on rented platforms is temporary. What they have not built yet is their own system.
Social media companies say they connect people. The data shows something different. Conversation down. Self-expression down. New connections down. Killing time up. This is no longer a social network. It is a content engine built for advertising.
When the platforms stop showing your posts to your own followers, owned infrastructure keeps running. Email. Direct relationships. Systems you control. In a world of bot-heavy feeds and algorithm-powered distribution, owning your reach is the only stable path left.
Roberto Nickson hit 1 million views in 10 hours on his Nano Banana video — His short-form video strategy: speed (front-running search volume), narrative craft, cultural relevance, and sound design. The constraint: all that optimization depends on algorithmic timing. Platform controls whether 1M people see it or 1,000. Speed-to-market matters, but platform dependency determines actual reach.
Zero-click search pushes marketers toward content-driven branding over traffic optimization — Rand Fishkin: "Brand marketing is where it's at. How do you build a brand that's memorable, emotionally resonant?" As AI Overviews and zero-click SERPs consume more queries, brands shift from traffic metrics to voice, personality, and emotional resonance. The limitation: brand still depends on platform visibility to reach audiences
Organic search success in 2026 requires presence across AI Overviews, People Also Ask, video carousels, and forum discussions — Rankings are leading indicators, not outcomes. New signals: visitor quality, SERP diversification, traffic across multiple discovery platforms. The technical requirements: schema markup, structured data, documented APIs. Platform-dependent creators on Medium, Substack, or social platforms can't implement these optimizations.
Bing confirms the research stage of customer journeys moved into conversational AI — "It's not that people are no longer clicking. They're just clicking at later stages in the journey." Discovery, research, and decision-making now happen inside AI Search. New visibility metrics: citations, impressions, and placement in AI answers. The shift: platforms control what gets cited and when clicks happen.
Marketing attribution depends on leading indicators, not lagging metrics—but most teams only report what already happened — Devin Bramhall argues monitoring signals like unprompted content sharing, consistent engagement patterns, and competitor copycats reveals what's working before revenue confirms it. The challenge: convincing stakeholders that leading indicators predict future impact. One client maintained 60-70% newsletter open rates regardless of send schedule—signal that owned distribution infrastructure works independent of algorithmic timing.
Visa partnered with Lumanu to offer near-instant creator payouts through Visa Direct, replacing week-long cross-border transfers. Lumanu has processed $1.5 billion to date. U.S. creator ad spend projected at $37 billion this year. The underlying problem: payment infrastructure doesn't solve ownership infrastructure. Faster payouts don't create portable equity.
Michael
Operator @WP Folio - now WP Defense Lab. Same Plugins. Different Name.