Is the Golden Age of Meta Ads Over?

Hey there, we’re live on X and YouTube.

Jacob kicked it off Monday night: the founders who scaled in the golden age of Facebook ads “are not worth listening to anymore,” because creative, offer and landing-page standards are now far higher. His bar: if you haven’t bootstrapped a brand in the last 2–3 years, he doesn’t care what you say (Jacob on X).

Sean Frank has a different read on this month’s soft numbers. He pegs midterm ad spend at $11 billion, likely closer to $15 billion, almost all of it negative, and says that drags on conversion rates. He says he’s up 70% this month anyway: “you can not stop the american consumer” (Sean Frank on X).

Shopify dropped its Fall ’26 Edition, “Exponential,” with more than 150 updates landing weeks before Black Friday. Shopify’s VP of Product Vanessa Lee joins us at 1:05 CT to walk through it. What operators should look at first:

Koerner says he’s buying newsletter subscribers for $1.40 each, cheaper than when agencies ran his account, without logging into Ads Manager once. Muse adjusts budgets, connects to Beehiiv and uploads lookalike and custom audiences on its own. The post passed 27K views (Chris Koerner on X).

Molson Hart says that since March 2025, Amazon pays only the item’s cost when it loses FBA stock, not what the sale would have paid. Freight, tariffs, inbound shipping and storage fees aren’t covered, sellers must reveal supplier costs, and Amazon can resell the unit if it turns up later (Molson Hart on X).

Two weeks after a “life changing” exit, an anonymous founder posted how he dominated his category on Meta. The core of the thread: stop optimizing for purchases alone and teach the algorithm what a good customer looks like. The opening post passed 1.5M views and 24K bookmarks (shdu on X).

Quick number that should bug every DTC operator: Klaviyo only recognizes about a third of your returning shoppers. Everyone else browses anonymously and your flows sit idle. Tie identifies up to 70% of your total site traffic and pushes those shoppers into the flows you already run.

Caraway used Tie’s Predict scoring to lift opens 40% and clicks 30% while sending 20% fewer emails. Same stack, zero dev work.

Book a walkthrough, and when you do, tell them the Cowboy sent you.

Funko POP News posted a first look at the McDonald’s x Pokémon Happy Meal toys, packed in tiny Happy Meal boxes and dropping 11/10. The post passed 229K views and 3.9K likes. Expect another collector rush and resale run like past McDonald’s card collabs (Funko POP News on X).

Cheerios is partnering with Ziploc on what it calls the first-ever resealable cereal bag, built to keep cereal fresh longer. It’s a packaging fix shoppers have wanted for decades, and the announcement post passed 235K views. A co-branded utility play that gives an old product something new to say (Daily Loud on X).

Dove’s soap-scented perfume retails around $20, and one shopper posted screenshots of resale listings near $600, joking that nobody involved “sees heaven.” When a mass brand turns its signature scent into a limited drop, the resale market tells you how much demand was left on the table (yikes forever on X).

Shopify merchants can design an email in Canva and publish it directly to Seguno as a newsletter, template or automation, with no downloading or uploading. Multi-page designs become a full automation series, and edits in Canva republish without rebuilding the email (Seguno on X).

The format that never dies hit again: a side-by-side of the listing photo and what actually showed up. The post passed 1.1M views and 4.1K likes. Every one of these is free marketing for brands that can prove the product looks like the photo (Adewale on X).