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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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)