Snapshot taken July 11, 2026. We track 82,856 live and recently-active Meta ads from 1,633 hand-picked DTC and B2C brands. The winners get hand-tagged by hook and angle into the swipe file. Run-time uses Meta's own ad start date where available. Curated, not scraped.
On Meta, ad longevity isn't vanity — it's a confession. Brands kill losers in days and ride winners for as long as they keep converting. So the length of time an ad has been live is the closest thing to a public confidence score a competitor will ever give you. We measured it across 82,856 DTC ads. The distribution is savage.
The survival curve falls off a cliff
Nearly two-thirds of everything — 52,232 of 82,856 ads — is switched off before day 30. By 90 days you're down to roughly one ad in ten. A full year is functionally the elite tier: just 460 ads, 0.6% of the corpus, have run continuously for 365 days or more. Those 460 are the ads that print money. Everything else is a test that failed.
| Run length | Ads | Share | Still surviving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 30 days | 52,232 | 63.0% | 37.0% |
| 30–90 days | 22,071 | 26.6% | 10.4% |
| 90–180 days | 6,177 | 7.5% | 2.9% |
| 180–365 days | 1,916 | 2.3% | 0.6% |
| 365+ days | 460 | 0.6% | — |
The move: when you spot a competitor ad that's been live 90+ days, stop everything. You're looking at a top-10% survivor — a creative that's earned its budget for a straight quarter. That is the single highest-signal thing you can steal in advertising. The catch: the raw Ad Library won't tell you an ad's run-time. The swipe file's run-length filter does — it's built on exactly this data.
Here's what 500 DTC brands are running this week
A small slice of the curated swipe file — every ad here is currently in market, hand-tagged by hook + angle. Open the full feed →
The sectors that endure aren't the ones you'd bet on
Here's the twist. Among the high-volume sectors, home, wellness, baby, and fitness ads run longest (median ~20 days). The fashion-led categories — apparel and beauty — burn fastest at a median of just 14. Apparel ships more ads than anyone and keeps each one live the shortest. Fast fashion, faster creative death.
| Sector | Median run | 90th pct | Ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 21 days | 100 days | 6,006 |
| Wellness | 20 days | 95 days | 9,847 |
| Baby | 20 days | 92 days | 3,248 |
| Fitness | 20 days | 99 days | 4,339 |
| Jewelry | 17 days | 117 days | 1,546 |
| Accessories | 16 days | 89 days | 9,127 |
| Skincare | 16 days | 78 days | 7,417 |
| Food | 16 days | 87 days | 6,840 |
| Beauty | 14 days | 79 days | 7,038 |
| Apparel | 14 days | 83 days | 16,981 |
Smaller consumable categories (coffee, haircare, cleaning) show much longer medians of 40–74 days — but on samples of a few hundred ads from a handful of brands, so we've kept them out of the headline table.
Benchmark against your own sector, not a blog's round number. In home or wellness, a 3-week-old ad is barely warmed up. In apparel, a 3-week-old ad is already above median. Either way, the ads worth copying are the survivors — and finding them by hand across 82,856 ads is a job you'll lose.
Skip the graveyard. The swipe file is pre-filtered to long-runners, hand-tagged by hook and angle, and refreshed weekly. Sort by run-length and you're looking at proven winners in seconds instead of scrolling dead ads for an afternoon. Open the feed →