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Field guide

Every way a rank gets priced

Paying to be seen is much older than this wave — bid-for-position directories sorted sites by payment in the 1990s, and GoTo.com ranked search results by advertiser bid in 1998. What follows is the same idea, sorted into five layers and the named mechanics inside them.

11 mechanics across 450 boards

Strict pay-to-rank

319 boards

Payment decides position directly. The number you pay is the number that sorts the list.

412 Single highest bid One bid holds the position. A higher bid replaces it outright; the old bid is spent. 68 Cumulative bid Payments stack on one listing. Bidders top up an existing total instead of replacing it. 33 Pay the difference The next holder pays a set increment above the current bid rather than an open amount. 5 Refundable outbid Being outbid returns some or all of the previous payment to its holder.

Pay-to-own

45 boards

Payment buys a specific holdable thing — a country, a slot, a throne — that someone else can take.

Spatial advertising

32 boards

Payment buys visible area or a place on a map, not a row in a ranked list.

23 Pixel ownership A fixed canvas is sold by area. What you buy is space on the page, not a rank number. 12 Map takeover Places on a map are held until someone pays the takeover price for that place.

Time-based ranking

37 boards

Rank expires. Resets, seasons and decay mean a position has to be re-bought.

21 Decay A position loses value as time passes, so holding rank costs money continuously. 11 Weekly season Ranking runs in seasons. Standings close and restart on a weekly or monthly cycle. 8 Daily reset The board clears on a fixed daily boundary. Yesterday’s spend buys nothing today.

Adjacent models

17 boards

Not strictly pay-to-rank, but trading attention by the same logic — votes, referrals, causes.

23 Community click Free actions — votes, clicks, referrals — move rank alongside or instead of money. 1 Charity bid Bids are routed to a cause rather than kept as revenue by the board.

How a board gets sorted into one of these

Every board’s own words — its tagline, its page title, its description and the first few thousand characters of visible copy — are matched against a published list of phrases. A match records the phrase that triggered it, and that phrase appears on the board’s page in its evidence ledger, so a classification can always be argued with.

Where nothing matches, a board is filed under single highest bid, which is the default shape of this wave, and the field is marked estimated rather than observed. That is a guess, and it is labelled as one.

Corrections are free and welcome. If you run a board and it is filed under the wrong rule, that is the fastest thing on this site to fix.