Aleksandr Dolgopolov
Writes about: SMM, paid boosts, ads, traffic, suppliers, the market from the inside, daily news
mrpopular has been running since 2014, and promotion has been in front of my eyes all that time: social networks, search engines, ads, suppliers, orders, disputes, statistics.
One company holds every side of the market: a promotion service where most services are our own rather than resold; the etask marketplace, where tasks are done by real people; a support desk that shows what customers actually complain about. So the texts contain what agency reports leave out: supplier prices, drop-off rates, chat logs, statistics screenshots.
A marketing blog without fairy tales. What works, what stopped working, what it costs and why.
Posts
Where your watch hours go missing on the way to monetization
Analytics shows 5,000 hours, the Earn tab shows 2,800. It isn't a bug. I break down what YouTube throws out of the counter, how to reconcile the numbers yourself, and how to avoid wiping your own hours before February 1, 2027.
AleksandrNovember 3, 202621 min read
A single drop, 4 ways to write off followers
Instagram erases the follow, TikTok purges fakes, YouTube stops counting spam, X puts accounts on hold until they pass a check. How to tell what happened to your followers.
AleksandrOctober 28, 202612 min read
Instagram Is Betting on Carousels and Photos Again
Between June and September 2026, Instagram gave carousels per-slide captions, music replacement and bonuses, and moved links in posts into Meta One, starting at $49.99. What to change in your plan.
AleksandrSeptember 29, 202610 min read
Why a comment on LinkedIn now matters more than the post
On 9 August 2026 LinkedIn stopped sorting comments by time: each reader now sees their own thread. I break down how an expert comment became a separate reach channel.
AleksandrSeptember 29, 20268 min read
Microsoft checks the file, not the picture
On September 14, 2026 Microsoft Advertising published rules for AI-generated ads: disclose the generation, do not strip watermarks and provenance metadata, do not pass a deepfake off as reality.
AleksandrSeptember 16, 202610 min read
Where Did Reddit's Citations in ChatGPT Go
Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations fell from 3.83% to 0.52% in August 2026. I break down why seeding threads no longer earns mentions and where to move the budget.
AleksandrSeptember 13, 20269 min read
The site is open for people, closed for AI
First week of September 2026: settings meant to stop AI scrapers are cutting off Googlebot and AdsBot. The share of 4xx responses to crawlers grew from 14.04% to 35.79% in a year. What to check and whom to let in.
AleksandrSeptember 10, 202610 min read
TikTok turned comments into a separate channel
On September 3, 2026 TikTok switched on voice comments, polls, carousels of up to nine photos and live photos. Here is what a creator and a brand should do with all this while the format is still empty.
AleksandrSeptember 9, 20268 min read