Rented traffic is anything you pay for every time you want it, ads mostly. Turn the budget off, the traffic stops immediately. Owned traffic keeps showing up because of something you built once, content that keeps ranking, an audience that keeps returning. It doesn't switch off when the invoice does.

More advertisers bid for the same keywords every year. Ad platforms run on auctions. More competition for the same inventory means the price of that inventory goes up. Not a fluke, the business model working exactly as designed.

It pays off slower than ads and lasts longer than ads. Ads convert on day one and stop the moment you stop paying. Content usually takes months to rank, then keeps paying after you've stopped spending. Which one's better depends entirely on how long you plan to be in business.

LTV is what a customer is actually worth across everything they'll ever buy from you, not just the first purchase. A business that only tracks the first sale is optimizing for the wrong number. Two customers can cost the same to acquire and be worth completely different amounts over time.

Yes, just less dramatically. A site that already ranks for the obvious terms in its niche has already grabbed the easy wins. New content is still worth it, it's just chasing harder, more specific territory instead of low-hanging fruit.

It depends entirely on what you're publishing into. A generic post competing against thousands of similar posts can take months just to get indexed and noticed. But content answering a specific, underserved question, something people are actively searching for and nobody's answered well yet, can get picked up and start ranking within days. Demand finds supply fast when the supply is actually filling a gap. The slow timeline is what happens when it isn't.