Your May trend roundup: platforms, parasocial dynamics, and the fake feed
Our May roundup on misleading metrics, audience ownership, and why the creators winning right now are treating followers as participants
Our May trend roundup
As we head into a new month, it’s time to reflect on the trends that we’ve been tracking throughout May. And as we were resurfacing these trends, a couple overarching themes emerged…
Metrics are more complicated than what you see at face value. From Instagram’s head telling creators that follower counts don’t matter (right as the platform needs Reels to compete with TikTok) to the estimate that 90% of what you see online is advertising in disguise, there’s a growing gap between what looks like success and what actually is. Follower drops after pregnancy announcements aren’t cultural moments, they’re structural ones. Viral clip campaigns that don’t sell tickets aren’t failures of talent, they’re failures of sequencing. The version of success that platforms have been selling creators is changing.
Audiences want to own the story, not just watch it. Whether it’s fans pledging $337 million to collectively buy back a defunct airline, followers ditching creators the moment the parasocial contract shifts, or audiences living the reality TV drama between episodes rather than waiting for Bravo to package it, people are done being passive. The old model where you broadcast and they consume is breaking down. The creators and brands who are winning right now are the ones treating their audience as participants with a stake in the outcome, not just viewers waiting to be entertained.
📊 Instagram is telling creators that follower counts are misleading. That’s not the whole story.
Adam Mosseri, the Head of Instagram, went on his stories recently to do an AMA and dropped a take that got a lot of people talking: follower count is the most misleading metric for content creators. Reach and views are what matter, he said.
We hear him. But we don’t fully buy it.
Here’s the thing. Mosseri isn’t totally wrong that the game has changed. TikTok rewired how content travels online. The interest-based For You feed meant that even accounts with tiny followings could reach millions of people. So yeah, the old idea that reach flows directly from followers is less airtight than it used to be.
But here’s what he’s missing. Followers and reach aren’t in competition. They move together.
We saw this firsthand with our client Mariana Atencio, a Venezuelan American journalist and speaker. When we started working with her, she had 142k Instagram followers. She’s now at 570k and counting. And what the data showed very clearly was that as the follower number went up, so did her reach. The two were absolutely connected. [you can read our Q&A with Mariana about how we grew her audience here]
So when Mosseri says followers don’t matter, what he really seems to mean is that follower counts don’t matter as much to Instagram. With the platform looking to compete with TikTok via Reels, they’re more concerned with video reach.
“Reach is on them. As a content creator I would be much more concerned with: are people commenting, are people liking, are people hitting follow, are people saving my content.” - Emma Marshall
more on how much followers really matter here
🤰 creators are losing thousands of followers for announcing pregnancies
Female creators have been sounding the alarm for months: announce a pregnancy, lose thousands of followers overnight. One creator cited in a recent Marie Claire piece dropped 6,000 followers in 24 hours. The instinct is to frame this as a cultural indictment, women opting out of motherhood and opting out of other women who choose it. But we think this is a lazy read [no offense].
What’s actually happening is more structurally interesting, and more useful for anyone thinking about audience and content strategy.
There are three reasons creators bleed followers after a pregnancy announcement, and none of them are about hating mothers:
The gaslighting problem: Nearly every creator says “nothing is going to change” when they announce. But everything changes. Audiences who have lived experience with this recognize that language immediately and it reads as out of touch. Honesty about what will shift lands far better than false reassurance.
The parasocial relationship reset: People describe their favorite creators as “close personal friends.” When a close friend has a kid, that relationship fundamentally changes. The follower unfollow is less rejection and more a natural relationship recalibration, except it’s happening at scale and in public.
The Facebook birthday effect: Pregnancy content performs extremely well with new and aspirational audiences, which means it gets pushed widely. That push surfaces the creator to people who followed them ages ago and forgot they did. The announcement becomes a prompt to reassess, not a reason to stay.
we break down how creators are navigating this here
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Here’s what you can expect…
Andy Cohen says social media drama is killing reality TV. He’s not wrong. But the fix he wants isn’t realistic [Bravo is reportedly exploring contracts that limit cast members from engaging with drama accounts between episodes. While this makes sense for the network, we don’t love it for the talent]
Your 2026 platform strategy: one size no longer fits all [a 2026 platform-by-platform strategy guide so you know exactly where to invest, create, and scale]
The internet is trying to buy Spirit Airlines back [an ex-MrBeast creator is trying to get TikTok to collectively own an airline, and $337 million in pledges later, it's hard to dismiss entirely]
The feed is fake. Here’s what that actually means for your strategy [every major musician, actor, and podcaster has a clipping operation running behind the scenes]
