I pulled outbid.lol's public API. Here is what $175,438 in four days actually bought.
Four days ago a leaderboard appeared with one rule: your rank is whatever you paid. No ads, no algorithm, no accounts. By day four it had taken $175,438 from 1,097 listings. By day five, $221,058 from 1,578. It is still accelerating as I write this.
It is a genuinely clever piece of work and I want to say so plainly, because most of what follows sounds like criticism and is not meant as one. But outbid.lol publishes its whole database through a public API, including what every listing paid and how many clicks it received. That makes something possible which normally is not: you can check, precisely, whether people got what they paid for.
Seven buyers paid for half of it
A mean many times the median is not a market. It is two populations sharing a page: a handful of whales, and a very long tail of five-dollar lottery tickets.
I measured twice, and the answer changed
Every listing reports its click count, so cost per click is simple arithmetic. I ran it on 23 August. Then, because something looked wrong, I ran it again exactly 24 hours later.
The listing at the top did not get better at marketing overnight. It simply sat there another day. Its clicks went up 6.3x, its price went up 13%, and its cost per click fell by 82%.
Cost per click here is a function of how long a listing has been up, not of what it paid or where it ranks.
You can watch it work in any single snapshot. On 24 August the two worst deals on the board were its two newest arrivals: #2 paid $16,000 for $2.36 a click, and #8 paid $4,000 for $11.63 a click, while #1 above them was getting $0.51. Not because they ranked lower. Because they bought in later.
Why that is a problem, not a curiosity
Every ad product in the world sells you a quantity of exposure: impressions, clicks, a slot for a defined period. You know roughly what you are buying before you pay.
This board sells you a position, and exposure accrues to it afterward, for as long as nobody displaces you and the site keeps drawing a crowd. Neither is promised or knowable at the moment you pay. So a $16,000 bid might turn out to be $0.50 a click or $2.50 a click, and which one you get is decided by events after the transaction. That is not a price. It is a place in a queue whose length nobody has told you.
The rule that ends it
Bids are permanent. Nothing expires. Nothing is refunded.
So the top only ratchets upward. Day one it cost a few dollars. Day four it costs $15,005. Nobody arriving on day thirty outbids that, so the top freezes and the people who would have generated the next $15,000 quietly leave.
And there is no second sale. The seven whales have paid, and there is nothing to buy twice. outbid.lol has no accounts, so it has no email addresses, so it cannot even tell a buyer they have been outranked. A dollar auction gives you a spectacular first week. It does not give you a week eight.
What I would change: one rule
Reset the board monthly, and keep a permanent all-time record alongside it. Every dollar counts toward both at once. One payment, two effects, no second product.
A note on the API
outbid.lol's public ranking endpoint returns each listing's payment-provider order ID and checkout ID alongside the public fields. Those are not secrets in the dangerous sense, but they are customer transaction identifiers exposed on an unauthenticated endpoint, and there is no reason for them to be in a public response.
I have published none of them here and I would suggest they be removed from the payload. The operator was notified privately before this went up. Every other number in this article is public information about a public leaderboard, and I have used only that.