How it works

For members

Membership is $9 once, with 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. New memberships are not on sale right now. Existing accounts are unaffected.

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 the point 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.

Listing is free and there is nothing to bid on. You submit, a reviewer reads it, and once approved it runs for30 days. There is no paid placement here and no amount of money that moves a listing up the board. 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

Three terms, weighted. Nothing here is secret, and none of it is for sale: the only way up the board is an offer members take.

• Click-through

  50% 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. The offer members actually want climbs past the one nobody redeems.

• Freshness

  30% 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

  20% of the score

  Whether the company is verified, whether there is a discount badge, a pitch, a real description and tags. 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 drops freshness and quality too. It is pure click-through, which is the ladder a new advertiser climbs.

What we publish

The ranking terms and their weights are on this page, and the code that computes them ismeasured in public: visitor counts, click totals and how many promos have been unlocked. There is no figure to publish about what a listing costs, because a listing costs nothing.