Media

Ad-supported social and content. Engagement is the product: DAU/MAU stickiness, retention curves, and the power-user curve predict survival, while eCPM and fill rate convert attention to revenue. Growth must be near-organic — paid-propped social rarely sustains.

Ad-supported media businesses sell attention. The product is not content or features — it is the engaged time of an audience, packaged and sold to advertisers at a rate set by eCPM and fill rate. This means the fundamental operational challenge is building a habit: a surface that users return to daily, browse deeply, and engage with repeatedly generates far more inventory than one with high installs but low engagement.

Engagement as the Core Asset

DAU/MAU stickiness is the single most important structural ratio for ad-supported media. A platform where daily actives are a large fraction of monthly actives has a predictable, monetizable inventory base. D1, D7, and D30 retention curves show whether new users convert into habitual ones. The power-user curve (L5/L30 — the distribution of how many days per month users engage) distinguishes a platform with a passionate core from one with a broad but shallow audience; advertisers pay premiums for both depth and demographic precision.

Monetization Mechanics

With an engaged audience established, revenue is a function of fill rate (the share of available ad impressions that are actually sold) and eCPM (the effective revenue per thousand impressions). ARPDAU — average revenue per daily active user — is the composite outcome metric that ties engagement to monetization. Monthly growth rate in DAUs is the leading indicator of future inventory scale. One structural constraint the model imposes: user acquisition that isn't at least partially organic is difficult to sustain, because paid-propped engagement often fails to convert into the habitual use that advertisers actually value.