Questions

Yes. Checkout runs through Stripe and your card is charged for real. Payola never sees your card details — you are handed to Stripe’s own checkout page and returned with a reference.

A balance, not a position. Rank is every live balance on the board, sorted. You pay the difference between what your listing holds and what the spot costs, so an existing listing pays less than a newcomer to reach the same place. A new listing starts at $5; topping one up starts at $1, and no listing goes above $999,999.

No. Once a payment settles it becomes balance, and balance burns down from that moment. There is no mechanism to reverse it and no path to request one. Treat every payment as spent the second you make it.

Your Owner Console lists every settled payment against your listing — amount, date, and the rank it bought. That page is the record. Nothing is emailed, because we have no email address for you.

Not in the sense you probably mean. A listing is keyed to the target, so there is only ever one listing per site — paying on it adds to that balance and raises that listing. You cannot buy a second slot for the same site, and there is no ownership claim to make. Whoever paid first receives the private console session. If a listing is misusing your brand, mail abuse@payola.lol.

The tagline and X handle, yes — supply new ones with any later payment and they replace what is there. Leave them blank and your existing ones are kept, so topping up never quietly wipes your copy.

The link itself, no. The target is the listing’s identity, so a different URL is simply a different listing with its own balance.

Return to the confirmation page you were sent to after paying — the address with ?paid= in it, still in this browser’s history. It can restore the private console session on this browser.

If that is gone too, the session is lost. There are no accounts, no passwords and no email on file, so there is nothing to send a reset to and no way for us to prove the listing is yours. Your listing is unaffected — it stays on the board and keeps burning. You simply lose the private dashboard for it.

Chat and invite links, link shorteners, adult content, raw IP addresses and anything that is not a public http or https address. Attempts are refused at submit time, before any money is taken. How it works has the detail.

Somebody settled a payment while you were at checkout. The quoted rank is advisory and the board can move under it. We never refuse a payment for that reason — your money is on the board in full, it just bought a lower spot than quoted. The confirmation says so plainly when it happens, and topping up the difference climbs back.

No, and that is the entire point. Every balance loses 2% a day. Above about $50 that works out near fifty days of runway no matter how much you stake, so money buys height rather than time. First place gets cheaper every morning nobody defends it.

Its balance reached zero and it archived. Nothing is deleted — the click history survives, and any payment brings it straight back. The one thing a revived listing loses is its tie-break seniority, so it now sits behind listings of equal balance that never left.

The only ranking on the site money does not decide. It shows the 24-hour click leaders with two numbers: where attention puts them, then where money does. A listing at #1 / #18 is the most-clicked link on the board sitting eighteenth by balance. Orange marks a listing pulling more traffic than it pays for.

They are ours to defend, which is the reason they go through our own redirect rather than an analytics vendor. Repeat clicks from one visitor inside 60 minutes count once. Bot traffic is recorded but excluded from every public figure and from Movers.

Only if you agreed to it, and only for counting clicks. Decline and the redirect still works — it simply writes nothing and sets no identifier. There is no advertising network here, no third-party analytics, and no profile built across sites.

When you do agree, what is stored is a salted hash of a random first-party id, never a raw IP or cookie value. Clicks are kept 24 months, the “reading now” heartbeat 24 hours. The privacy policy is the full account.

No, and any board that tells you otherwise is either lying or about to be penalised. Every outbound listing link carries rel="sponsored nofollow", because that is what a paid link is and search engines are explicit about wanting it marked. What you are buying is attention from people, not ranking signal from crawlers.

Yes, and no key is needed. /api/board returns the whole board — every balance, burn rate, runway and click count, with the same numbers the page renders. The mechanic is meant to be inspectable.

Payola LLC, 1550 Wewatta St, Denver, CO 80202, USA. General questions go to legal@payola.lol, privacy requests to privacy@payola.lol, and content complaints to abuse@payola.lol. The terms set out the rest.