How it works

For members

You pay $9 once. There is no sign-up form and no subscription. When the payment clears we generate a username and a password, show them to you, and let you download them as a text file. That file is the only copy. There is no password reset, because there is no email address we trust enough to reset against.

Charging for the account does two things. It keeps the board small enough to be worth reading, and it means every account belongs to a person rather than a script, which is what companies want before they hand over a working code.

For advertisers

Your listing page carries a link to your own site that anyone can follow without an account, because that traffic is what you are paying for and there is no reason to hold it back. Only the code itself is behind the membership. Both kinds of click are counted and reported to you separately.

You name your own price, from $5 up. What you pay is your bid, and your listing runs for 30 days. You can raise your bid later and what you add is cumulative. Every outbound click is tagged with utm_source=promo.party so the traffic appears in your own analytics under its own name, and you get a click report with a daily chart and a country breakdown.

The ranking

Four terms, weighted. Nothing here is secret, because a ranking an advertiser cannot understand is one they cannot spend sensibly against.

• Your bid

  50% of the score

  What you paid to be listed, passed through a logarithm. Doubling your bid does not double your rank. A $500 bid outranks a $5 one by roughly three times, not a hundred. That keeps one advertiser from owning the page.

• Click-through

  25% of the score

  Members going to redeem, divided by impressions, smoothed so a listing with one impression and one click cannot claim a perfect record. Only member redeems count here: anybody can follow a listing's public site link, and a number anyone can generate for free is a number somebody would farm for rank. A cheap listing that members actually want will climb past an expensive one nobody redeems.

• Freshness

  15% of the score

  Decays over about three weeks. A promo that has been on the board for a month is a worse answer than one posted yesterday.

• Listing quality

  10% of the score

  Whether the company is verified, whether there is a discount badge, a pitch, a real description and tags. This one is free. It costs nothing but the effort of filling the form in properly.

Why the listing at the bottom still gets seen

Ordering by score alone freezes the board. The listing on top keeps collecting impressions, keeps its click-through fed, and nothing below it can ever catch up, including a better offer that arrived a week late.

So only the top 3 slots are pure score order. About 30% of the remaining slots are drawn by lottery from everything further down, with each listing weighted by its own score. A cheap listing is never hidden, only rarer. The draw is seeded by the clock rather than by chance, so the board is stable if you reload it and reshuffles for everybody at once every 10minutes.

A new listing also gets an exploration window: for its first few hundred impressions it is scored on its other terms rather than on a click record it has not had the chance to earn. And theRising tab ignores bids entirely. It is pure click-through, which is the ladder a small advertiser climbs.

What we publish

Bids are shown on every listing. Visitor counts, click totals and total advertiser spend are on thestats page, in public, for anyone deciding whether this is worth paying for.