The short answer
'Active' in the Meta Ad Library means an ad is delivering now. It says nothing about budget. The useful signal is active plus an old start date: only 17% of the 749 brands on our board have a winning ad still active after a year, so an old active ad is rare and meaningful. Watch for relaunches, which reset the date.
The short answer
"Active" is a yes/no flag: the ad is delivering today. On its own it is a weak signal, because an ad can be active on $5 a day. It becomes a strong signal when you combine it with the start date. An ad that is still active many months after it started has survived every budget review the advertiser ran in between.
Every ad on the Ad Radar board is active (2,443 Meta ads with $50k+ in estimated spend, snapshot of October 9, 2026). That lets us look at what "active plus time" looks like across 749 brands.
120 days
median time active since start date
338
ads still active after a year
129 of 749
brands with a winner active for a year or more
99
hooks relaunched on more than one Library ID
Active vs inactive: what each status means
| Status | What it means | Visible for commercial ads outside the EU? |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Delivering now | Yes |
| Inactive | Stopped delivering | No, it drops out |
| Inactive, delivered in the EU | Stopped, but reached the EU | Yes, for one year after the last impression |
The retention rules come from Meta's Ad Library tools page: political and issue ads are kept for seven years, EU ads for one year after their last impression, and other ads only while they are active. That has a practical consequence. For a US brand, the "Inactive" filter usually shows little or nothing. The active list is the whole visible history.
Active also doesn't mean big. Since December 2025 the library flags ads with fewer than 100 impressions as "Low impression count" (PPC Land). Those are tests that never got budget. Skip them.
Why an old start date matters
Ads die young. Here is how the active ads on our board are spread by start date:
| Started | Ads still active |
|---|---|
| April to September 2026 | 1,800 |
| January to March 2026 | 184 |
| October to December 2025 | 136 |
| July to September 2025 | 99 |
| January to June 2025 | 117 |
| 2024 | 55 |
| 2023 or earlier | 52 |
The count falls off fast as you go back in time. Part of that is how the board is built (ads need time to cross $50k, and we only track ads that are live today). But the shape is the point: for every ten winners that started this spring or summer, roughly one from the start of the year is still running. Each ad in the older rows has been reviewed, again and again, by someone with a budget, and kept.
It's time to retrieve all those files you thought you lost.
- Est. spend
- $2.5M
- Days live
- 1442
- Format
- Video, 57s
Active for almost four years and still in the top tier. The ad is a plain product demo for a file-recovery gadget. Nothing about it is trendy, which is probably why it lasts.
Old active ads are also rare at the brand level. Only 129 of the 749 brands on the board (17%) have any winning ad that has been active for a year or more. If a competitor has one, it is the closest thing to a proven control they will ever show you. Our data on how long winning Facebook ads run has the full distribution by niche and format.
Caveat 1: relaunches reset the clock
A start date belongs to a Library ID, not to a creative. When a brand duplicates an ad into a new campaign or ad set, the copy gets a new ID and a new start date. The concept is older than the date says.
We found 99 cases on the board where the same brand runs the same spoken opener on two or more Library IDs, 235 ads in total. In 27 of those cases, the start dates are 60 or more days apart.
I don't want to wear foundation every day, so I do this instead.
- Est. spend
- $3.8M
- Days live
- 608
- Format
- Video, 59s
This ID has been active 608 days. The same opener runs on a second ID that started 400 days later and is now in the top tier. Judge the concept by the oldest copy you can find.
This is a sign of yeast growth.
- Est. spend
- $296K
- Days live
- 144
- Format
- Video, 82s
- Variants
- 3
At 144 days this looks like a mid-age ad. Two other IDs with the same opener have been active 584 days. The brand relaunched a proven ad with three versions. The real age of the idea is more than a year and a half.
How to catch relaunches: when you find an interesting active ad, search its body text as an exact phrase in quotes, and transcribe the first spoken sentence of each video on the Page. Identical openers with different start dates mean a relaunch.
Caveat 2: active days are not delivery days
The start date marks the first delivery. If an advertiser paused the ad for a month and turned it back on, the span since the start date still includes that month. Some ad cards now show a total active time; when you see it, compare it with the start date. A big gap means the ad was off for a while.
For research this rarely changes the conclusion. An ad that was paused and then switched back on is still an ad the advertiser chose to bring back.
Caveat 3: active on which Page
Many winning ads run from Pages that aren't the brand's own: creators, partners, review Pages. On our board, 62% of ads point to a website that also gets ads from at least one other Page. A brand's own Page can look quiet while its oldest active winner runs from a creator's Page. Our Ad Library search tricks cover how to find those Pages.
How to read active status in practice
- Filter to active, then sort your attention by start date. The Ad Library won't sort by age for you, so scan the Page and list every ad older than 90 days.
- Treat anything active past 180 days as a control. Study its hook, angle, offer and landing page before you look at anything newer.
- Check for relaunches. Search the body text and the opener. Use the oldest start date you find as the concept's age.
- Ignore low-impression ads. They are active in name only.
- Add the other signals. Variants and engagement growth tell you whether an active ad is being pushed or just left on. The four-signal scorecard is in how to find winning Facebook ads.
- Save what you find. Outside the EU, an ad that stops is gone. Log it while it is active. Our swipe file guide has the fields to record.
If you'd rather not do the date math, the Ad Radar board shows days live, variants and estimated spend on every active ad, and boards let you keep the ones you want with CSV export.
Figures marked as estimated spend come from Ad Radar's model of engagement on public Meta Ad Library ads. They are estimates, labeled as such, and are best used to rank ads against each other.