☕️ News sites are dying

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🔍 Facebook now answers your questions like Google

📈 Instagram views are surging in 2026

📉 News sites are dying

🚫 Chrome update is about to break your ad blocker

📌 AI search ads are about to explode

💡 + 5 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 7 other news & articles you might like

FROM OUR PARTNER

• Meta has added a chatbot called AI Mode to Facebook that answers questions much like a search engine, using the example of someone asking for nearby summer vacation spots.
• AI Mode pulls data from across Meta's apps, including Groups and Reels, and promises "real perspectives and experience rather than a generic list of search results," powered by the recently-announced Muse Spark technology.
• The update also brings photo-editing tools, with collage cutout templates, new transition effects for video montages, and presets that change clothing, hair and accessories, such as virtually wearing a team jersey.

• Instagram views jumped 27% in early 2026 compared to the same months a year earlier, while interactions rose 19% and accounts published 24% more content across all formats, according to research from analytics firm Metricool.
• Metricool studied 24.36 million posts from 375,118 accounts worldwide during January and February of both 2025 and 2026, sorting accounts into five tiers by follower count, from Tiny under 2,000 to Huge over 1 million.
• Reels drove the gains with 1,035.48 average interactions per post and the only engagement rate increase at 24.76%, while single-image posts fell sharply, dropping 21.96% in reach and 25.41% in interactions year over year.

• Social media and video networks have become the main way people get news in 30 of the 48 countries tracked by Oxford's Reuters Institute, overtaking news publishers' own websites and apps.
• Between 2023 and 2026, news websites and apps lost 5 percentage points of users, the only category to decline, while Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all gained ground over the same period.
• The drop is steepest among younger people, with the 18-24 age group showing a 6-point fall in news websites as a main source since 2021, driven by the loss of younger former users rather than weak new sign-ups.

• Google will officially end support for Chrome extensions built on the older Manifest V2 system later this month, switching to Manifest V3 and effectively shutting down ad blockers like uBlock Origin on its browser.
• Manifest V3 does not ban ad blockers outright, but it caps the number of filtering rules an extension can apply and removes the dynamic blocking that lets tools like uBlock Origin keep up with fast-changing ad-delivery systems.
• Chrome users can switch to uBlock Origin Lite, but that version allows some tracking, carries a smaller blocklist, and cannot do dynamic filtering, while Firefox keeps full Manifest V2 support and uBlock Origin running on its Gecko engine.

• AI search advertising, driven by ChatGPT's ad rollout that began less than six months ago, is set to grab almost 40% of search ad revenue and bring in $100 billion by the end of the decade.
• WPP Media forecasts the category will jump from 1.9% of search ad revenue this year, worth $301 million, to 39.2% by 2031, with the U.S. currently making up 60% of global AI ad spend.
• Kate Scott-Dawkins said advertisers would shift both traditional search spending and e-commerce budgets into generative AI ad options, while Andy Arnett warned a scandal over unsafe AI answers could slow spending quickly.

Strategies & Tactics