78% to 0.05%: The Banner Ad's Fall

The proof is history. The first banner ad ran on HotWired in 1994, an AT&T ad that teased 'Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.' Its clickthrough rate: 78%. People clicked because a banner ad was a genuinely new thing on the internet.

By 2011, Facebook display ads averaged around 0.05%. That's a decline of roughly 1,500x. Nothing about ad quality got 1,500 times worse; the channel itself decayed as users learned, competitors piled in, and inventory exploded.

The same curve shows up everywhere you look. Email open and clickthrough rates have slid for years while daily email volume climbed into the tens of billions. Every 'hot new channel' in memory (app store features, Facebook virality, push notifications) has traced the same downward slope.