Paid user acquisition is a curse. Later stage consumer startups that depend on it are the walking dead.

• After launch, ROI declines consistently across every advertising channel
• Early metrics are misleading because traffic is front-loaded due to the way ad algos work

Digital ad metrics have decayed every year since the industry was created.
• CPMs on major ad networks are now increasing at ~40%/yr.
• In 1997, CTR on HotWired was 78%. In 2019, Facebook’s average CTR is about 0.9%.
(H/t @andrewchen)
Facebook/Google algorithms are so good at targeting people that paid acquisition traffic tends to be highly front-loaded.

Founders and investors are often shocked when numbers rapidly decay — because the ad population has been saturated.
So, what’s the answer for these startups? I think a few things:
1. Optimize ad spend as the userbase saturates
2. Build a distribution moat to re-target customers later
3. Focus the core business on things that spread organically
4. Explore emerging advertising channels quickly

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THIS.

Russia hasn't been a willing partner in this treaty for almost 3 decades. We should have ended the pretense long ago.

Naturally, Rand Paul is telling anyone who will listen to him that Trump is making a HUGE MISTAKE here.


Rand is just like his dad, Ron. 100% isolationist.

They've never grasped that 100% isolationist is not 'America First' when you examine it. It really means 'America Alone'.

The consistent grousing of pursuing military alliances with allies - like Trump is doing now with Saudi Arabia.

So of course Rand has also spent the last 2 days loudly calling for Trump to kill the arms deal with Saudi Arabia and end our alliance with them.

What Obama was engineering with his foreign policy was de facto isolationism: pull all the troops out of the ME, abandon the region to Iranian control as a client state of Russia.

Obama wasn't building an alliance with Iran; he was facilitating abandoning the ME to Iran.

Obama wouldn't even leave behind a token security force, so of course what happened was the rise of ISIS. He also pumped billions of dollars into the Iranian coffers, which the Mullah's used to fund destabilizing activity [wars/terrorism] & criminal enterprises all over the globe