·Business & Strategy
Section 1
The Core Idea
In 2012, Andrew Chen published an essay that named something every growth team already felt in their bones but hadn't articulated cleanly. He called it the Law of Shitty Click Through Rates. The thesis: over time, all marketing channels experience declining performance. Not some channels. Not poorly managed channels. All of them. The mechanism is structural, not operational. And the implication rewires how serious operators think about distribution, growth, and channel strategy.
The evidence starts at the beginning of internet advertising. On October 27, 1994, AT&T placed the first banner ad on HotWired.com. It was a simple rectangle — "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will." — and it achieved a 44% click-through rate. Nearly half of everyone who saw it clicked. By 2003, the average display ad CTR had fallen to 0.5%. By 2024, it sat at 0.35%. The channel didn't get worse. The novelty evaporated. Users learned to ignore the rectangles. Designers called it "banner blindness" — a term coined by Benway and Lane in a 1998 usability study at Rice University that demonstrated users could complete tasks on ad-heavy pages without consciously registering any of the ads. The 44% CTR wasn't a reflection of banner advertising's effectiveness. It was a reflection of its unfamiliarity.
Email tells the same story on a different timeline. In the early 2000s, commercial email open rates regularly exceeded 90%. By 2010, the average had dropped to roughly 30%. By 2024, Mailchimp's benchmark data pegged average open rates across industries at 21.3%. The mechanism was identical: early recipients treated email from brands as novel and interesting. As volume increased — the average office worker received 121 emails per day by 2023, according to Radicati Group — users developed filtering behaviors. Promotional tabs in Gmail. Unsubscribe habits. The unconscious scroll past anything that looks templated.
Facebook organic reach followed the same arc with a different twist. In 2012, a brand's post on Facebook reached approximately 16% of its followers organically. By 2014, that number had dropped to 6.5%. By 2024, estimates placed average organic reach at 1.9–2.2%. Part of this was the standard novelty decay — users grew accustomed to branded content in their feeds. But Facebook added a second force: deliberate throttling. As the platform matured, Facebook shifted its algorithm to prioritize paid distribution over organic, converting organic reach into a monetization lever. The channel degraded through both user habituation and platform economics simultaneously.
Chen's insight was not that any single channel degrades. It was that degradation is the default state of every channel, and the forces driving it are structural. Three mechanisms operate in parallel. First, novelty erosion: users encounter the format, learn its patterns, and develop unconscious filtering. Second, saturation: as more companies adopt a channel, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. When one company sends email, it's personal. When ten thousand companies send email, it's spam. Third, platform capture: the platforms that control distribution — Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok — have economic incentives to degrade organic performance and sell the delta back as advertising. The channel isn't broken. It's been monetized.
The strategic implication is uncomfortable: every growth hack has a half-life. The tactic that drives your best numbers today will produce your worst numbers in three years. Google AdWords averaged $0.05 per click in 2002. By 2024, the average CPC across all industries exceeded $4.22 — an 8,340% increase. The channel still works, but the economics have shifted from bonanza to bare margin for anyone without structural advantages in conversion or lifetime value.
The founders and operators who internalize this build differently. They invest in owned audiences — email lists, communities, direct relationships — that don't depend on platform algorithms. They diversify channels before the current one degrades. They treat distribution as a portfolio, not a bet. And they accept that the search for new channels is permanent, not a problem that gets solved once.
