576d
Baby Knits · video
346d
Based Supplies · video
333d
Brilliant Earth · video
317d
Qomfort Co. · video
Live creative benchmarks · October 2026

The benchmarks report that
updates while you read it.

Every other creative benchmarks report is a PDF assembled last quarter from an anonymized dataset, locked behind a form. This one recomputes from the live shelf — real Meta ads, named brands, every ad watchable inside the product. No email required to read a single number.

154,687ads tracked · never deleted
662brands, all named · more every day
53,403ads rescued after Meta erased them
just nowlast recomputed · not an annual PDF

Sample currently skews DTC supplements, wellness & beauty — and we say so. Methodology at the bottom, uncensored.

The four questions everyone gates

Here are the answers.
You don’t have to give us your email.

Competitors tease these exact questions to capture a lead, then mail you a PDF. We just answer them — the data is public, and the point is to show you the shelf is real.

17d
How old is a typical live ad?
Median age of every live ad on the shelf. Half die sooner — most of what you see running was launched recently.
10%
How many ads become real winners?
Only 10% pass 90 days. 34% clear 30 days — the line where an ad stops being a test.
49%
Which format wins most often?
Video takes 49% of 90-day survivors, from 52% of live ads. Image punches hardest for its size — 46% of live ads, 49% of survivors.
51d
Which persuasion angle runs longest?
Humor leads on average run length across 651 classified ads — the full ranking is two scrolls down.
Chapter 1 · Survival

How long a real ad lives.

Run duration is the closest public proxy for ROAS: nobody keeps paying to serve a loser. Every live ad on the shelf, bucketed by how long it has been running.

Longevity

How old the live ads are

n = 101,284 live ads across 662 brands

0–7 days · testing22,371 ads · 22%
7–30 days · validating44,867 ads · 44%
30–90 days · proven23,837 ads · 24%
90+ days · core winners10,209 ads · 10%
Only 34% of the ads running today are past day 30. If your creative team measures itself on launch volume rather than survival, this is the number that should reset the conversation.
adshelf.app/report · recomputed just now
Format mix

All live ads vs 90-day survivors

Purple = share of everything live · green = share of what survived 90 days

Video52% live · 49% of survivors
Image46% live · 49% of survivors
Carousel2% live · 2% of survivors
The formats over-represented in green are the ones the market actually keeps paying for — the gap between the two bars is the whole insight.
adshelf.app/report · recomputed just now
Chapter 2 · Angles — nobody else publishes this

Which persuasion play
earns the longest run.

Every ad on the shelf is AI-classified by the play it runs, then we measure how long each play survives. This cut doesn’t exist anywhere else, because it needs both the classification and the archive.

Humor
51d avg · 24d median · 651 ads
Founder story
46d avg · 25d median · 708 ads
Demo
36d avg · 22d median · 4,318 ads
Convenience
35d avg · 19d median · 26,482 ads
Problem-first
35d avg · 19d median · 6,688 ads
Lifestyle
34d avg · 20d median · 27,922 ads
UGC
34d avg · 21d median · 8,287 ads
Comparison
34d avg · 17d median · 2,861 ads
Social proof
33d avg · 17d median · 12,629 ads
Discount
32d avg · 16d median · 18,867 ads
Science
31d avg · 17d median · 12,541 ads
Education
31d avg · 19d median · 1,182 ads
Seasonal
26d avg · 16d median · 5,682 ads
Lifestyle is the most-launched angle at 27,922 ads — but Humor runs 1.5× as long on average. That gap is the arbitrage.
adshelf.app/report · recomputed just now
Why this one is different

A snapshot ages.
This has a pulse.

The annual PDF report

  • Assembled once, then slowly goes stale all year
  • Anonymized — you can’t look up a single brand in it
  • Locked behind an email form before you see one number
  • A static file: no filtering, no drill-down, no ad you can watch
  • Ends. You read it, you file it, nothing changes

The living shelf

  • Recomputes continuously — today’s numbers, not last quarter’s
  • Every brand named, every ad watchable inside the product
  • Free to read in full. Email is only for the weekly delta
  • Live pages behind it: benchmarks, the wall, the angle matrix
  • Compounds — every brand added deepens the sample forever
The only thing worth an email

Get the weekly delta.

You just read the whole report free. The email gets you what a PDF can never send: what changed this week — which ads finally died, which crossed 90 days, which angle is heating up, and which brands joined the shelf.

Weekly. Unsubscribe anytime. No gate on the data above — ever.

Citing these numbers?
Take them. All we ask is a link — and they’ll still be right next year.
adshelf.app/report

Methodology. Statuses and start dates come from Meta’s public Ad Library, collected continuously per tracked brand; run duration = days since an ad’s start date. Live ads only unless stated. The library also holds 53,403 stopped ads with full run histories Meta no longer shows anyone. Sample currently skews DTC supplements, wellness and beauty — we publish the composition rather than hide it. Any brand that advertises on Meta can be added to the shelf in seconds, which is how the sample keeps widening.

Your competitors’ winners are already in here.

Add your own brands and the same report recomputes around your category.

Start free trial See the live shelf