We copied a good idea and said so.

Wilke shipped a leaderboard where rank is simply whoever paid the most, posted one line about it on X, and watched a million people show up in forty-eight hours. No algorithm, no editorial, no pitch deck. It worked because the mechanic takes five seconds to understand and because every bid is a public status move that the bidder then advertises for you.

Credit where it belongs: @jonathan_wilke found the idea, and outbid.lol is the original. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we would rather link to it than quietly hope you never notice the resemblance.

Because the thing that made outbid spread is also the thing that makes it uncomfortable. You pay for a rank, the rank expires, and you own nothing. Nobody publishes what a slot actually returned, so nobody can tell whether $14,000 for the top spot was a media buy or a very expensive feeling. Two hundred clones inherited that silence without touching it.

So we kept the mechanic and changed exactly one thing: every rank publishes what it returned. Clicks and cost per click sit on the board for every listing, live, counted by our own redirect, whether the numbers flatter us or not. On any given day our most expensive slot may well show worse unit economics than the cheap ones. It does today. That stays up.

Everything else follows from being able to keep that promise. There are only a hundred slots, because a board three hundred deep would mostly be publishing proof that its own tail is worthless. Rank decays out of a 24-hour window, so prices cannot ratchet until newcomers are locked out. Every day is frozen into an archive that we never rewrite.

• Grow the board without first publishing what the added slots returned.
• Take money to hide, delay or round a number.
• Run a listing of our own without marking it as ours. Minbar is ours and says so.
• Present any of this as an editorial ranking. It is paid placement and it says so everywhere.

Those are in the rules, where you can hold us to them.