First-order effects

• Advertisers who bought pixel space in 2005–2006 are the direct losers: with 22% of the page's links now pointing at dead URLs, roughly a fifth of those paid placements no longer resolve anywhere.
• The page itself persists as a working artifact, so the remaining 78% of links still deliver traffic — meaning the value of any given slot now depends entirely on whether the advertiser's own domain survived.

Second-order effects

• Because pixels nearer the top and left sold first, the rot maps onto purchase timing: the earliest buyers' placements have had the most years to decay, quietly repricing the page from 'permanent advertising' into something closer to a finite-duration ad buy.
• Anyone still valuing legacy inbound links — SEOs, domain brokers, archive projects — gets a natural dataset here showing that paid placement offers no durability guarantee beyond the linked site's own lifespan.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, even deliberately preserved novelty pages function less as monuments than as decay experiments, strengthening the case for active web archiving rather than assuming 'it's still online' equals 'it will stay online'.
• For the broader paid-links economy the lesson is structural: a link outlives its target only by luck, which pushes long-horizon advertising toward assets someone actively maintains rather than one-time placements left unattended.