The ads that are still running

Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money

Advertising is spend, every day, forever. A test costs a few hundred dollars and gets switched off within a week when it does not work. An ad that has been live for three weeks survived that decision, and one live for six months has survived it many times over.

That is why runtime is the first thing on every card here, and why twenty one days is the bar we treat as proof. Below it you are looking at somebody else's test. Above it you are looking at something that pays for itself.

The ad is the start of a trail, not the end of one

Finding a good ad and then having no idea what it is selling is the failure mode of every spy tool. Where we can resolve it, an ad carries the product it advertises, the price on the storefront, the store itself, and a route to a supplier who has the same item.

So the ad stops being a screenshot to admire and becomes a lead you can price. From one card you can get to what it costs to source, what the advertiser is charging, and what would be left if you sold it at the same price.

• Filter to ads running twenty one days or more, which is the proof bar
• Search by niche, by what the advertiser charges, or in plain language
• Save an ad and come back to it, or open the creative full size

Facebook tells you what and how long. TikTok tells you how big

Facebook ads resolve to a product, a price and a runtime, which makes them the better lead. What they do not carry is reach, because Meta only publishes impression figures for political and issue ads, so a missing audience number there is a gap in the source and not in our collection.

TikTok is the other way round. Its ads carry view counts, so the scale of a campaign is visible, but they rarely resolve to a product you can go and source. Each side is shown for what it is rather than blended into one misleading average.