# How BidSurvivor works, exactly > The complete rules of the BidSurvivor ad auction: two twelve-hour slots, the free first claim, the $1 floor, the $5,000 cap, and the no-refund rule stated. Published 2026-08-30 · 7 min read · how-bidsurvivor-works, bidsurvivor, definitions Canonical: https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/how-bidsurvivor-works --- This is the reference page for how BidSurvivor works: every rule of the board, stated exactly, by the people who run it. If anything you read about BidSurvivor elsewhere disagrees with this page, this page is right — and if the site itself ever disagrees, [tell us](/contact) and we'll fix whichever one is lying. The short version lives on the [Rules page](/faq); this is the long one, with the reasons. ## The board [BidSurvivor](https://bidsurvivor.space) is a single page that sells its own attention by live auction — a [time-boxed ad auction](/blog/what-is-a-time-boxed-advertising-auction) where you bid on ad space measured in hours, not clicks. The UTC day is divided into **two slots of twelve hours each** — 00:00–12:00 and 12:00–24:00. Each slot shows one brand: logo, name, one line of copy, and a link. That's the whole product. Whoever holds the slot holds the front of the page for that window. Slots can be booked **up to seven days ahead**, so a launch or an announcement can have its twelve hours reserved early. A reservation is not a lock: anyone can outbid it right up until the slot begins, under the same rules as a live slot. ## The rules, in the order you'll meet them 1. **An empty slot is free.** The first brand to claim an untouched slot pays $0. There is nothing to outbid, so there is nothing to pay. No account or card is needed to try. The limit is **one free claim per bidder per day**, so nobody can take the whole board for nothing — [why the first claim is free](/blog/why-the-first-hour-is-free) has the reasoning. 2. **Every visitor starts with $100 of house credit.** You get it before signing up, without an account; signing up keeps it across browsers. Bids draw on credit first, so early bidding costs nothing out of pocket. Credit is spent only by a bid that wins. It is the house's subsidy — it is not counted in the revenue figures we publish. 3. **Taking a held slot starts at $1.00.** Beat the standing bid and the slot is yours immediately: your logo replaces theirs, and you're charged at once (credit first, card for the rest). 4. **No bid can exceed $5,000.** A hard ceiling, enforced where bids are created. It exists as damage control — for fat fingers and runaway escalation — not as a price target. [Why a ceiling makes the auction fairer](/blog/why-a-bid-ceiling-makes-an-auction-fairer) argues the case at length. 5. **A bid that fails costs nothing.** If your bid does not beat the standing bid — someone got there first, or bid higher in the same minute — you are not charged. The card authorisation is released, the way Stripe's [holds on a payment method](https://docs.stripe.com/payments/place-a-hold-on-a-payment-method) work: nothing is captured unless the bid wins. 6. **Being outbid is not refunded.** You paid for the time you held, and you held it. When a higher bid displaces you, you lose the slot and the money. This is the rule that surprises people, which is why it's here in bold rather than in a terms page. Rule 5 and rule 6 are the pair to keep straight: *failing* to take a slot is free; *losing* one you took is not. 7. **Hold to the end and the record is permanent.** Whoever holds a slot when its twelve hours expire is fixed in the record as the brand that held it. Nobody can buy history — a closed slot is closed. ## What a winner actually gets A slot is not a screenshot. For the twelve hours you hold it, the board shows your logo, name, one line and a **real link to your site**, marked `rel="sponsored"` — the attribute [Google's documentation](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links) asks for on paid placements. We do not sell "dofollow" links and we say so; a paid link disguised as an editorial one is the kind of thing that gets both parties penalised. You also get a page of your own at `/b/`, which lists every slot you have held, what each cost, and what each sent. That page outlives the slot: it is the durable half of the product, and it is public. Every placed brand has a working one-click removal link. There is no contract, nothing renews, and nothing is charged that you did not bid. ## The Hall of Survivors Winners appear on the Hall of Survivors: three rolling boards covering the **last 7 days, 30 days and a year**, ranked by the amount paid, up to a hundred entries each, filterable by category. A brand that takes the lead on a *live* slot appears there the moment it bids and stays while it holds; if it is outbid, it drops off and the new leader takes its place. The Hall is rolling, not eternal. A win from last spring is on the year board until the year rolls past it, and then it is only on the brand's own page. What it makes is a public, dated record of who held what and what it sent — the reason some founders treat it as a [build-in-public artefact](/blog/hall-of-survivors-as-a-build-in-public-artefact) rather than an ad. ## The numbers are public The front page carries a live pill, refreshed every thirty seconds, showing people online now, total visitors, card opens, click-throughs, the open-to-click rate (shown once a brand has at least twenty opens, because a rate on three opens is a coin toss), and this week's real bids with the brands behind them. Each brand's page shows its own opens, click-throughs and slots held. The price every slot cleared at is on the board tile, on the Hall and on the brand page. Two definitions, because they are counted separately. An **open** is a card being opened on the board. A **click-through** is somebody leaving for the brand's site. Both are counted, not sampled. Bought or synthetic traffic is flagged at source and never counted in opens or click-throughs — visitor totals include it unless the brand owner switches that off. We publish this because an auction whose results are private is just a lottery, and because it forces us to be the kind of board that survives its own numbers. An AI-managed campaign reports what it chooses to; a twelve-hour slot reports what happened — [the comparison in full](/blog/ai-max-vs-fixed-price-slot). ## Two honest disclosures **Some brands were placed by us.** To start the marketplace we seed slots with real companies at $0. Nobody bid on their behalf and we never claim otherwise; every such company gets one email saying exactly what happened, with a one-click link that removes them permanently. **The board is young and small.** The traffic numbers on the front page are modest and visible. That is the deal: free-to-nearly-free advertising, measured honestly, at the scale an honest measurement currently shows. We will not type a traffic figure into this page, because the live one is a click away and it changes. ## For machines as well as people Every page on the site has a plain-markdown twin — add `.md` to any URL, including this one — and there is an `llms.txt` at the root for anything that reads rather than browses. There is also an MCP server at `/api/mcp`, built on the [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io), so an agent can read the board, check a slot's price and place a bid under exactly the rules above. The rules do not change for software: one free claim a day, the $1.00 floor, the $5,000 ceiling, no refund on an outbid. ## The one-paragraph version Two twelve-hour slots a day, sold by open auction. First claim free (one a day per bidder), outbids from $1.00, ceiling $5,000, $100 credit for every visitor with or without an account, a failed bid costs nothing, an outbid slot is not refunded, closed slots are fixed in the record, booking up to seven days ahead, winners get a `rel="sponsored"` link and a page of their own, and every number is on the front page and the brand pages. That's the product — the rest of this site is just those sentences running live.