Pay-to-rank is a toll booth, not a product

On 19 August 2026, Jonathan Wilke launched outbid.lol after roughly three hours of work. The whole product is based on one rule: if you pay more, you rank higher. Bids started at $5, and by 22 August the site was reporting 1,147,442 visitors and $132,263 in bids, with the top position sitting at $14,013. Other trackers put the revenue closer to $178,000 within 77 hours, so the numbers differ depending on who is counting, which is already worth keeping in mind because almost every number in this story comes from somebody who benefits from it being large.

After that, the copies started appearing almost immediately. More than 190 were launched within the first week, and there is now even a directory whose only purpose is to track these bidding websites. Outoutbid.lol currently counts 508 pay-to-rank boards, including 256 for websites and products, 64 for X accounts, 64 for AI tools, 38 for ads and billboards, 28 for crypto tokens, 20 for regional currencies, and 13 that rank other bidding websites.

Some of the variations are actually creative, but they are still mostly the same idea with a different mechanic added on top. Warmap.lol lets you buy a country and allows somebody else to take it from you by paying 1.5 times what you paid. Landlords.lol turns the idea into a Monopoly-style board where a square starts at $1. Siliconcity.lol gives you a building on an isometric city map. Lastspot.lol adds decay, payluck.lol adds random discounts, and lowbid.lol runs the auction backwards.

Eventually, the idea moved beyond websites entirely. Marc Lou auctioned advertising space on ten of his muscles before competing in a HYROX race in Turkey. Bids started at $1,000, and taking over somebody else’s spot doubled the price. The winning logos were then placed on his body as temporary tattoos during the race. Reported bids reached $16,000 for his right chest and more than $60,000 in total.

The funny part is that almost none of this is actually new.

On 26 August 2005, a student named Alex Tew launched The Million Dollar Homepage, which was basically a thousand-by-thousand pixel grid where each pixel cost one dollar. The site eventually brought in $1,037,100 by the time it sold out the following January.

That same year, Andrew Fischer auctioned advertising space on his forehead through eBay, and a snoring remedy company paid $37,375 to place its logo there for a month.

So selling coordinates on a webpage as ad space is twenty-one years old, and selling parts of your body as ad space is also twenty-one years old. Marc Lou’s muscle auction is basically the forehead auction with better presentation, while the leaderboard websites are The Million Dollar Homepage with live bidding and a payment button.

What is actually worth learning from The Million Dollar Homepage is not the fact that Alex Tew made a million dollars. The more interesting part is what happened later.

Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab audited the page in July 2017 and found that, out of 2,816 embedded links, 547 were unreachable and another 489 redirected somewhere other than the website the advertiser originally paid to promote. In other words, 36.8 percent of the links no longer went where they were supposed to go. By 2019, the BBC estimated that around 40 percent of the original links were dead.

Tew actually kept his side of the deal, because the page itself still exists. The problem is that many of the businesses that bought space on it do not.

At that point, the site stops being useful advertising and starts becoming a historical archive of companies that once paid to be there.

There is also another part of the 2005 story that gets ignored when people bring it up today. The original worked because it was the original. There were many pixel-page copies afterwards, but almost nobody remembers them because they never became meaningful enough to remember in the first place.

That part matters much more when you look at what is happening now.

If you look at who is actually bidding on these things, the same type of people appear again and again. On Marc Lou’s body, for example, you find companies such as GojiberryAI, LinkBunny, TokPortal, Postiz, AudioPen and Linq. On the bidding websites, you mostly see AI tools, indie SaaS products, X accounts and other small internet businesses.

These are generally not large companies with real advertising departments and large media budgets. They are other founders and makers, usually trying to reach the same group of people.

That is basically the whole system. Somebody who already has an audience sells access to people who want one, and the money moves from founders trying to get attention to the person who already has the attention. Very little money is entering from outside that circle.

That is why I do not really see this as a new marketplace for attention. It is closer to a toll booth that somebody built on a road they already controlled.

You can see this even more clearly when you look at what the copies are earning. Public revenue trackers put warmap.lol at roughly $7,900 over thirty days, worldmap.lol at around $3,700, siliconcity.lol at $2,300, landlords.lol at $1,700, mapads at $216 and myearth.lol at $188.

The actual software was never the valuable part. The format takes a few hours to build, and anybody can copy it. The valuable part was the distribution behind the first successful version, and that is the one thing none of the copies can reproduce.

You can copy the mechanic, the design and even the pricing model, but you cannot copy the moment when everybody on X is suddenly talking about one specific site.

Once there are more than 500 versions of the same idea competing for the attention of roughly the same small group of founders, it becomes obvious where the real value was.

If we take the strongest possible case and look at the original site during the period when everybody was talking about it, it reported 867 listings and more than 190,000 outbound clicks.

That works out to roughly 219 clicks per listing. If you compare those clicks with the reported $132,263 in bids, the average cost comes to around $0.70 per click.

On paper, that does not sound terrible. In some advertising markets, $0.70 per click would actually look cheap.

The problem is that not all clicks are equal.

The people visiting these websites are mostly there because the leaderboard itself is interesting. They want to see who paid the most, who took first place, who got knocked down, and how ridiculous the bids become. They are not necessarily there because they are currently looking for a new project management tool, AI writing assistant or SaaS dashboard.

That means you are mostly buying curiosity traffic rather than people who already have a reason to buy your product.

The other issue is that 219 clicks per listing comes from the winner of the entire trend, during the period when it was receiving huge amounts of attention. Once you move away from the original and start looking at the fiftieth, hundredth or four-hundredth clone, the value of those clicks becomes much harder to defend.

Once you remove the bidding mechanic, these websites are basically product directories. You submit a product name, a link and a short description, and you get listed somewhere on the site.

Product Hunt does basically the same thing. BetaList does the same thing. Hundreds of smaller launch directories do the same thing.

The main difference is what determines the ranking.

On a normal directory, the ranking is usually based on votes, editorial selection, activity or some other signal coming from the audience. On a bid board, your position is determined almost entirely by how much money you paid.

I am not saying traditional directories are amazing either. Product Hunt has become much less useful for small founders than it used to be, and most launches do not suddenly turn into successful businesses because they appeared there.

There is a widely shared example from one founder who launched a side project in 2023, received around 300 upvotes and converted 91 paying customers. He later launched his main product in 2024, received 612 upvotes, became Product of the Day and converted one paying customer.

That pretty much tells you why Product Hunt should not be treated as some guaranteed customer acquisition channel.

Still, even when a directory launch does not generate many customers, it can leave something useful behind. You get a permanent page about your product on an established domain with years of history, existing search traffic and a large number of indexed pages. That page can keep appearing when people search for your product later, and the launch can also lead to secondary exposure through newsletters, aggregators and other websites that discover products through these platforms.

The outbound Product Hunt link itself is nofollow, so the benefit is not some magical SEO backlink. The value is the page around the link and the fact that it continues to exist on a website that people already know and search engines already understand.

Now compare that with a bidding board.

The domain might be a few weeks old, and third-party checkers have put outbid.lol at a domain rating of zero. Some of these boards also use dofollow links, which can sound better if somebody is thinking purely in terms of SEO, but that can actually make the situation worse.

If a website publicly shows the amount somebody paid directly beside a link and then allows that link to pass ranking value, it becomes an extremely obvious paid-link footprint. Google’s policies explicitly classify buying and selling links for ranking purposes as link spam.

There is also nothing stopping the site owner from changing every outbound link to nofollow or sponsored later. That could happen in one update, and the people who paid for the listing would have no control over it.

More importantly, there is no guarantee the website itself will stay online for very long.

The Million Dollar Homepage lost 36.8 percent of its original destinations over twelve years even though its creator actually maintained the project. These new bidding websites are novelty domains created during a very short trend, many of them by people who built them in a few hours.

I would be much more interested in seeing how many of those 508 bidding websites are still online in 2028.

That is the real comparison. It is not that directories always work while bidding boards never work. Both can send useless traffic, and both can fail to generate customers. The difference is that a normal directory can still leave behind a modest but durable page about your product, while most bidding boards are selling a temporary spike in attention on a website whose main attraction is the auction itself.

Once the auction stops being interesting, there is not much reason for anyone to come back.

I do not think any of this is fraud, and I do not think the people building these sites are doing anything wrong.

The rules are public, the prices are visible and nobody is being tricked about what they are buying. If a founder wants to spend $1,000 on one of these websites because they think the publicity will be worth it, that is their decision. If somebody manages to build one of these sites in three hours and make $100,000 from it, then fair enough.

What bothers me more is what this kind of trend teaches people who are watching it.

A large part of the audience around indie hacking and small software businesses consists of people who have not launched anything yet. They see screenshots showing three hours of work, more than $100,000 in revenue and more than a million visitors, and it creates a very specific idea of what building a business looks like.

The lesson becomes that you should find a mechanic, build it as quickly as possible and somehow get everybody to talk about it.

There is nothing wrong with building quickly, but the fact that something only took three hours to make is not automatically evidence that it is a great product. Sometimes it simply means that the thing being built is technically simple and depends almost entirely on distribution.

The other lesson is that visibility becomes something you buy.

Instead of people discovering your product because somebody recommended it, wrote about it or genuinely thought it deserved attention, you move higher because you paid more than the person below you.

That obviously works very well for the person who owns the leaderboard. It works much less reliably for everybody paying to appear on it.

Independent software still has one advantage that traditional advertising lost a long time ago, which is that recommendations can still feel genuine. Somebody shares a tool because they actually like it. A directory ranking can at least suggest that people voted for something. A list can suggest that somebody made a decision about what deserved to be included.

Every ranking that can simply be bought makes the next ranking slightly harder to trust.

That cost does not really fall on the person who built the board in an afternoon and made a large amount of money from it. It falls on everybody else who has to launch after the audience becomes even more skeptical about what is genuinely popular and what simply paid for the position.

There will obviously be another version of this trend at some point. It will probably have a different mechanic, a better design and another funny domain extension, but the structure will still be basically the same.

Somebody has attention, other people want that attention, and the person who already has it finds a way to charge them for access.

There is nothing mysterious about that business model.

The first person who manages to capture the attention can make a lot of money from it.

The five hundred people who copy them usually cannot.