Ranking and outbids

By your spot's total: everything paid for that spot in the current cycle, added up. Spots are ordered from the highest total to the lowest. Rank 1 is the top. A later payment adds to your total, so you can move up by paying more.

In words: businesses pay, the payments for each spot add up to a total for the cycle, and spots are ranked by total paid, with a tie keeping its place. The top five spots appear on the screen, #1 with its own QR code, and every spot is listed on the board's page. Paying more adds to your total, and you pay only what you add. On a board that runs in cycles, totals start again from zero when a cycle ends; a board with no end date keeps its totals.

The spot that reached the total first keeps the higher place. Paying enough to match another spot's total does not pass it; you must go above it. On a board with a bigger step, such as $5, passing a spot means beating its total by at least one step.

No. Only the amounts paid for the spot count. The service fee and any sales tax never enter the total, the tie-break or any figure shown on the board.

No. The owner did not choose the order and cannot change it. The owner's only choices about a spot are to approve, reject, suspend, reinstate or remove it, under the bid rules and the refund policy. A high place is not the owner's recommendation, and it is not a review or a measure of quality.

• On the screen in the venue: the top five paid spots. The #1 spot has its own code that people can scan to reach your website; spots #2 to #5 show their website's address written out. Each spot on the screen shows its name, its sentence if it has one, and its total.
• On the board's web page: every spot. Places 1 to 5 are tiles, the #1 tile the largest, and every place below fifth is a row. Each ranked spot has a button that prices taking its place.

The screen shows paid spots only. The board's page also lists the owner's own entries, labelled as unpaid, below the ranked spots.

You are outbid whenever another business's payment moves your spot down, by any number of places, not only when you lose the #1 place. A tie leaves you where you were and is not an outbid.

Only if you ask. When you pay, an optional box says "Email me if another sponsor moves ahead of this listing". Tick it and we email you when you are outbid, at most once an hour for each spot. The email never quotes an amount to pay: the price of moving back up is shown on your spot's page, with its fee, when you decide. Every outbid email has an unsubscribe link; once you unsubscribe, the page it opens offers a button to turn alerts back on.

Open your spot's page from the link in your latest email about it: your receipt, an outbid email or the approval notice each carries a fresh one. Choose a new total, see the amount you will pay and its service fee, tick the two statements and pay on Stripe's page. You pay only the difference between your current total and the new one, plus the service fee on that difference. The new total must be higher than your current one. See managing your spot.

At any time while the cycle is open, up to the cutoff. On a board that runs in cycles, new payments close for the last minutes of every cycle so that a payment does not complete after the cycle ends: 10 minutes at the platform's current setting, and the board says when the cutoff is in effect. A board with no end date has no cutoff. On a board with approval on, a spot whose card is held cannot be raised until the owner approves it.

No. Places can change at any moment until your payment completes, including while you are on the payment page. When your payment completes, you get the place your total buys at that instant. What is fixed when you start is the amount you will be charged.

At the end of each day, week or month, as the board's owner set it, the order is settled: the final standings are recorded in the board's Round Archive, which is permanent and never changes afterwards. Then every total starts again at zero for the new cycle. We email you a placement receipt with the place you finished at. Nothing renews on its own and your card is not charged again.

When a cycle ends, the owner can have each spot that was on the board copied into the new cycle at $0, marked "Carried", below every paid spot. It is a courtesy, not a placement: it holds no money, cannot pass anyone and cannot be passed, and its previous owner has no priority over it. Whoever pays the board's minimum for that website first takes it, and a carried spot nobody pays for disappears when the new cycle ends.

The owner may pin up to three entries of their own. They are not paid, have no rank or amount, and sit in their own labelled section below the ranked spots: "Featured by host · not a paid rank". If you pay the board's minimum for a website the owner has pinned, you take that spot over and it ranks with the paid spots.

Yes. The board's page updates its standings as payments complete, and your spot's page shows its current place. If you hold a sponsor account, it lists every spot you hold with its status.