Every advertising channel goes through a period of unusually good returns followed by a slow decline to ordinary. The pattern repeats because the mechanism producing it is an auction with limited supply.
Early returns are high because competition is absent
A new channel begins with more inventory than advertisers, so prices sit near the floor and results look exceptional.
Early adopters report returns far above their other activity, which is accurate and describes a temporary condition.
The advantage comes from the absence of competitors rather than from anything intrinsic to the format.
Platforms encourage this deliberately, keeping prices low while they build an advertiser base, because early adopters who see strong results become the channel's sales argument.
Reported success is what ends it
Strong results are shared, presented at conferences and written about, and other advertisers move budget in.
Because inventory is fixed by the audience's available attention, additional demand raises prices rather than expanding supply.
The channel converges toward the returns available elsewhere, which is the expected outcome of an auction with more bidders.
Audience attention sets the ceiling
A platform can increase ad load somewhat, and beyond a point the experience degrades and people use it less.
That limit is what makes inventory genuinely scarce and prevents supply expanding to meet demand.
Platforms therefore manage ad load carefully, which means advertisers should expect prices to rise rather than volume to grow.
Creative advantage decays on the same curve
Early creative in a new format stands out because viewers have not developed a pattern for recognising and ignoring it.
As conventions form, the format becomes recognisable, and the recognition itself becomes grounds for skipping.
This is why the same creative approach that defined a channel's early success stops working before the pricing has fully normalised.
Advertisers arriving late therefore face both higher prices and a harder creative problem, which is why replicating an early adopter's reported results is rarely possible.
What the pattern implies for planning
Treating exceptional early returns as permanent leads to plans built on a rate that will not hold, and to disappointment attributed to execution.
The realistic approach is to exploit the window deliberately while it exists and to expect convergence rather than to defend against it.
It also means maintaining capability in emerging formats has a value that is not visible in current performance, since the advantage only accrues to advertisers already present when the window opens.