The Law, Stated

Chen's law is one sentence: over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates. Not some strategies, not badly-run strategies. All of them, given enough time.

The implication cuts against how most teams operate. Marketers treat a decaying channel as a problem to fix with better creative or smarter targeting. Chen says decay is not a bug in your execution, it's a law of the environment. You can't avoid it, and in many ways it's counterproductive to try.

That reframing changes the job. If every channel is a melting ice cube, the skill isn't preserving the cube. It's knowing how fast it melts, extracting the most while it's cold, and always having the next cube coming.