If you only have ninety seconds with the data: the bottleneck on advertiser performance is creative throughput. The fastest-growing demand is consumer e-commerce. The investable bet is whatever collapses the unit cost of high-volume creative production at the moment the e-commerce wave arrives to use it.
The single largest variance in the data isn't budget, tenure, or buying tactics — it's creative throughput. Top-1% advertisers ship 280× more video per quarter than the bottom half, run 92 simultaneous campaigns against the median's 3, and pay 21× more per asset, not less. Tenure explains nothing (+17%). Format is table stakes (vertical video is ~100% of uploads in every tier). What's left to vary is the operating model: the assembly line.
This matters for an investor because it identifies the load-bearing variable. The lever on advertiser performance — the one tenure and efficiency cannot explain — is industrial-scale creative production. Whatever collapses its unit cost moves the line.
Consumer / e-commerce managed spend compounded 4.1× over the eighteen-month window; gaming grew 2.5×. Gaming is still the larger base by ~5×, but the growth differential is structural — consumer self-serve advertiser counts went from 400 to 2,567, a 6.4× expansion of the funnel itself.
Average spend per self-serve consumer advertiser fell $49.5K → $13.4K over the same window — which we read as a low-friction onramp signature, not a softening cohort. New advertiser count up 6.4× alongside falling per-account spend is the textbook shape of a market acquiring its next wave of customers before monetization climbs.
The thesis and the wave intersect on a single category: creative-throughput infrastructure. The market is forming under it right now. Four sub-categories worth mapping:
Text-to-video, batch image generation, model-driven variant production. The compute layer that makes 200 monthly assets per brand achievable at sub-$50/unit cost.
Briefing, batch management, asset libraries, freelancer routing. The workflow layer that converts compute into shippable campaigns at velocity.
Productized agencies serving the 6.4× wave of self-serve advertisers who need the throughput but not the in-house team. The services layer.
The ad networks that throughput growth flows through capture multi-sided benefit: more inventory liquidity, better targeting from richer creative pools, recurring revenue from the expanding self-serve funnel.
NUMBERS.md.