// the ad graveyard
Most paid ads die young.
We tracked 5,500+ ads running right now behind ~100 growing companies, and measured how long each one has stayed live. Half have been running under six weeks. But a stubborn few never stop: roughly 1 in 7 has run over a year, and a small cluster has been live for 4.5 years and counting. An ad that keeps running is an ad that keeps paying its way. Here is the whole distribution.
How long does a paid ad actually live?
Each point is the share of currently-running ads that have been live for at least that many days. The cliff is steep: spend churns fast as companies kill what doesn't convert. The long tail is the prize, the creatives so proven a company has paid to run them for years. Hover or tap the curve to read any point.
*The 4.5-year cohort (50 ads across 12 companies) is a floor, not an exact age: 29 of them are pinned at the Google ad archive's visibility limit of Oct 2021, so they have run at least that long, likely longer.
The oldest survivors, Deel and The Farmer's Dog, each have a Google ad that has run since at least October 2021, the day the public ad archive's visibility begins. Their real age is a floor, not a ceiling: they were very likely running before the archive could see them.
How ~100 growing companies get customers
Ads are one lane. This is the whole engine: for every company we've broken down, the channels actually driving growth, weighted 0 to 10 from the evidence. Filter by type, then open any company for the full teardown behind the bars.
Method: every ad counted is live right now (still marked active) in the public Meta or Google ad libraries, bound to a company by verified page or domain, never by name. An ad's age is its run time to date. The Google archive's history only reaches back to October 2021, so any ad older than that reads as “at least 4.5 years”, a floor. Channel weights are scored 0 to 10 from the same evidence. Figures round and update automatically. Built from the public ad libraries and traffic data behind our daily teardowns.
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