The Inevitable Decay: Mastering the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs in 2025's Digital Battlefield
May 4, 2024
Marketing professionals operate in a constantly shifting landscape where yesterday's winning strategy becomes today's ineffective approach. This phenomenon, known as the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, stands as one of the most persistent challenges facing digital marketers in 2025. As tactics age, performance deteriorates—often dramatically—forcing continual innovation and adaptation. Understanding this principle isn't just academic; it's essential for survival in an increasingly competitive digital environment.
What is the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs?
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs was first articulated by venture capitalist and former Uber growth lead Andrew Chen in 2012. In its simplest form, the law states that "over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates." Chen observed that marketing channels and tactics that initially perform exceptionally well inevitably decline in effectiveness as they mature.
This concept revolves around a fundamental truth: marketing performance naturally degrades over time. The initial effectiveness of a new channel or tactic stems from multiple factors including novelty, limited competition, and unsaturated markets. As audience exposure increases and competitors flood the space, returns diminish—often precipitously.
The law applies across virtually all marketing channels, from early internet banner ads to modern TikTok campaigns. According to the 2024 Digital Marketing Erosion Report by Similarweb, the average new marketing channel sees effectiveness decline by approximately 30% after six months of mainstream adoption and up to 70% after two years.
This isn't simply about clickthrough rates, despite the name. The principle extends to all marketing performance metrics: conversion rates, engagement, cost-per-acquisition, and ultimately, return on investment. As Chen elaborated in his 2023 follow-up analysis, "The half-life of marketing innovation continues to shorten, with tactic effectiveness deteriorating twice as quickly as it did a decade ago."
Historical Examples of the Law in Action
The digital marketing timeline provides numerous textbook examples of the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs:
Banner Ads: Perhaps the most dramatic example, the first banner ads in 1994 achieved clickthrough rates of approximately 44%. By 2000, this had fallen to below 1%. In 2025, the average display ad clickthrough rate hovers around 0.05%, representing a staggering 99.9% decrease from those early days.
Email Marketing: When email marketing became widely accessible in the late 1990s, open rates often exceeded 80% with conversion rates well into double digits. Today's benchmark email open rates average 20-25% across industries, with conversions typically below 3%, according to the 2025 Email Marketing Benchmark Report by Campaign Monitor.
Search Advertising: Early Google AdWords customers enjoyed cost-per-clicks of pennies and minimal competition. Analysis from SEMrush's 2025 Digital Advertising Cost Index shows the average CPC in competitive industries like insurance, legal services, and finance now exceeds $25, making what was once an accessible channel prohibitively expensive for many businesses.
Social Media Organic Reach: Facebook Pages once regularly reached 25-30% of their followers with organic posts. By 2025, average organic reach has plummeted to approximately 1.5%, forcing brands to pay for exposure to audiences they previously reached for free.
Influencer Marketing: Early adopters of influencer marketing in 2015-2017 saw ROIs averaging 800-1000% according to the Initial Influencer Marketing Effectiveness Study. The 2025 Influencer Marketing Hub report indicates average ROIs have settled around 150-200% as consumer skepticism has grown and costs have increased.
Each of these examples confirms Chen's observation that "the first-to-market advantage is real but temporary." The pattern repeats with remarkable consistency across channels, platforms, and tactics.
Why Marketing Tactics Inevitably Degrade
Understanding why this degradation occurs helps marketers anticipate and mitigate its effects. Several fundamental forces drive the law:
Market Saturation: As more businesses adopt a channel or tactic, consumers face increasing competition for their attention. A landmark 2024 attention economy study by Nielsen found that the average person is exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements daily—more than double the exposure in 2010. This saturation creates natural limits to effectiveness.
Adaptation and Fatigue: Consumers develop mental filters to screen out marketing messages over time. Research from the 2025 Consumer Attention Span Report by Microsoft indicates that the human attention filter has become increasingly sophisticated, with people now able to unconsciously filter marketing content within 0.25 seconds of exposure—33% faster than just five years ago.
Platform Monetization: As channels mature, the platforms themselves often alter algorithms and structures to maximize their own revenue. Facebook's algorithmic changes between 2018-2025 represent a clear case study in how platform owners eventually extract more value, diminishing organic reach and increasing advertising costs.
Regulatory Constraints: Privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and their global counterparts have restricted data collection and targeting capabilities. The 2025 Digital Privacy Impact Assessment by Deloitte quantified this effect, showing that targeting restrictions have reduced marketing effectiveness by an average of 17% across channels.
Competitive Acceleration: First-mover advantage erodes rapidly as competitors copy successful approaches. The 2024 Marketing Innovation Diffusion Study found that the average time between a marketing innovation and widespread competitive adoption has compressed from 24 months in 2010 to just 47 days in 2025.
These forces act in concert, virtually guaranteeing the eventual decline of any marketing tactic or channel, regardless of its initial effectiveness.
Measuring and Tracking Performance Decay
Effectively navigating the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs requires robust measurement systems that can detect performance degradation early:
Cohort Analysis: Rather than looking at aggregate metrics, sophisticated marketers track performance by acquisition cohort. This approach helps isolate whether degradation stems from channel fatigue, audience quality, or other factors.
Normalized Comparison: To accurately measure decay, metrics must be normalized against variables like seasonality, industry trends, and overall market conditions. Modern analytics platforms now offer AI-powered normalization to provide clearer signals amidst the noise.
Diminishing Returns Analysis: The 2025 Performance Marketing Handbook recommends establishing quantitative models that predict the point of diminishing returns for each channel. These models typically incorporate factors like frequency, recency, and competitive intensity.
Relative Performance Indicators: Absolute metrics can be misleading. Leading organizations track performance relative to industry benchmarks and historical baselines. The most sophisticated teams utilize "degradation velocity" metrics that quantify the rate of decay for specific tactics.
Control Group Testing: Implementing holdout groups allows marketers to distinguish between natural performance decay and other factors affecting campaign performance.
The Marketing Analytics Association's 2025 best practices guide recommends establishing channel-specific "decay rate expectations" to facilitate proactive planning rather than reactive responses to declining performance.
Strategies to Counteract Declining Returns
While the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs cannot be repealed, its effects can be mitigated through strategic approaches:
Continuous Innovation: Companies that maintain dedicated innovation budgets show 41% slower decay rates than those that don't, according to the 2025 Marketing Innovation Index. This requires allocating resources specifically for testing new channels and approaches before they become mainstream.
First-Mover Focus: Organizations that consistently adopt channels early in their lifecycle report 3.2x higher average ROI than late adopters. This requires developing organizational capabilities to quickly evaluate and deploy emerging marketing technologies and platforms.
Value-Based Differentiation: Content that delivers genuine value shows significantly slower performance decay. The 2025 Content Marketing Institute report found that educational, problem-solving content maintains effectiveness 2.7x longer than purely promotional material.
Channel Portfolio Management: Just as financial investors diversify across assets, marketers should diversify across channels with different maturity levels. The optimal portfolio typically includes established channels for reliable performance alongside emerging channels for growth potential.
Audience Segmentation Refinement: As channels mature, audience quality becomes increasingly important. Advanced segmentation that continuously isolates and targets high-value audience segments can partially offset broader performance declines.
Creativity Premium: While data drives modern marketing, creativity remains a powerful differentiator. The 2025 Creativity in Digital Marketing study by Kantar found that highly creative campaigns experience 23% slower performance decay than their formulaic counterparts.
Trendyol, Turkey's leading e-commerce platform, exemplifies effective counteraction strategies. When facing declining returns from standard social media advertising, they developed a proprietary live shopping technology that integrated with existing platforms while providing a novel experience. This innovation delivered 4.3x the engagement of their standard campaigns and maintained its effectiveness for 18 months before significant degradation occurred.
Industry-Specific Applications and Considerations
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs manifests differently across industries, requiring tailored approaches:
Finance Sector Applications: Financial services companies face particularly rapid degradation due to high competition and consumer skepticism. Leading finance marketers counter this by emphasizing educational content and tools. JPMorgan Chase's 2024 strategy shift from product-focused advertising to financial literacy content resulted in a 37% slower decay rate for their marketing performance.
E-commerce and Retail Adaptations: Retailers have pioneered rapid experimentation models to combat performance decay. Amazon tests over 10,000 marketing variations monthly, allowing them to continuously optimize despite channel maturation. Smaller retailers have found success through micro-segmentation, with companies like Warby Parker maintaining effectiveness by creating increasingly granular customer segments.
Technology Sector Approaches: SaaS companies have embraced product-led growth models that make the product itself the primary marketing channel, partially insulating them from external channel degradation. Slack's approach of optimizing in-product viral loops rather than increasing advertising spend delivered a 62% improvement in customer acquisition cost efficiency.
Manufacturing and Industrial Applications: B2B industrial companies have effectively countered declining digital marketing performance by developing sophisticated account-based marketing programs. The 2025 B2B Marketing Survey found that companies with mature ABM programs experienced 58% slower performance decay than those relying on traditional lead generation approaches.
Telecommunications Strategies: Telecom companies have successfully leveraged first-party data to counter declining performance. T-Mobile's shift to hyper-personalized messaging based on usage patterns and customer lifecycle stage maintained marketing effectiveness despite increasing competitive pressure.
Future-Proofing Your Marketing Strategy
Building resilience against the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs requires systematic approaches:
Experimentation Infrastructure: Organizations that have built robust experimentation capabilities can test 5-10x more hypotheses than those without, according to the 2025 Growth Experimentation Benchmark Report. This allows for more rapid adaptation as performance declines.
Channel-Specific Sunset Planning: Forward-thinking marketers establish quantitative thresholds for channel performance that trigger reallocation of resources. These "sunset metrics" prevent the common mistake of clinging to deteriorating channels too long.
Cross-Functional Growth Teams: Companies that integrate marketing, product, engineering, and data science into unified growth teams adapt more quickly to changing conditions. The Breaking Marketing Silos study found that cross-functional teams identified channel degradation 47% faster than traditional marketing departments.
Acquisition-to-Retention Balance: As external acquisition channels mature and become more expensive, increasing emphasis on retention and expansion of existing customers provides partial insulation from the law's effects. The 2025 Customer Economics Report found that companies allocating at least 40% of their marketing resources to retention experienced 31% less volatility in overall marketing performance.
Predictive Degradation Modeling: Advanced marketing organizations now employ AI-powered predictive models that forecast performance decay across channels, enabling proactive rather than reactive resource allocation.
BlackRock's marketing organization exemplifies future-proofed strategy. They maintain a "channel innovation pipeline" that continuously evaluates emerging platforms, allocating 15% of their budget to channels with less than 18 months of market maturity. This approach has enabled them to maintain consistent acquisition costs despite significant market changes.
Common Mistakes in Addressing Performance Decline
When confronting the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, organizations frequently make several critical errors:
Doubling Down on Declining Channels: The most common mistake is increasing spending on deteriorating channels in an attempt to maintain absolute performance numbers. This approach typically accelerates ROI decline rather than reversing it.
Chasing Vanity Metrics: Organizations often pivot to tracking metrics that look better rather than confronting declining performance in core business outcomes. This creates an illusion of success while masking fundamental problems.
Reactive Rather Than Proactive Shifts: Companies that wait until performance has already significantly declined before exploring alternatives find themselves in a continuous cycle of playing catch-up in increasingly crowded channels.
Misattributing Decay Causes: Without proper analytical frameworks, organizations often misdiagnose the causes of declining performance, leading to ineffective remedies. The 2025 Marketing Attribution Survey found that 64% of organizations incorrectly attributed channel degradation to creative or tactical issues rather than fundamental market maturation.
Neglecting Competitive Analysis: Many marketers focus solely on their own historical performance, missing critical context about competitive intensity that explains performance changes.
Overrotating to Unproven Channels: In panic over declining returns, some organizations abandon established channels entirely for unproven alternatives, creating unnecessary volatility in their marketing performance.
Conclusion
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs remains an immutable force in digital marketing, as relevant in 2025 as when Andrew Chen first articulated it. The organizations that thrive despite this challenge aren't those that attempt to defy the law, but those that build systems and capabilities that acknowledge and accommodate it.
Successful marketing now requires continuous innovation, disciplined measurement, strategic diversification, and the organizational agility to pivot as channels mature. By understanding the fundamental forces driving performance decay and implementing structured approaches to counter them, marketers can maintain effectiveness in an increasingly challenging digital landscape.
The most resilient marketing organizations embrace the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs not as a frustration but as an opportunity—a force that rewards innovation, creativity, and strategic thinking while punishing complacency and tactical dependence.
Ready to build a marketing strategy that accounts for inevitable performance decay? Start by auditing your current channel mix, establishing robust measurement systems, and allocating resources specifically for channel innovation and experimentation. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs may be inevitable, but its impact on your marketing effectiveness doesn't have to be.
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