PayolaBack to the board

How it works

Payola is a public leaderboard you buy your way onto. There are no ads, no accounts, and no algorithm. Your rank is your money — and your money leaks.

You don’t buy a rank. You buy a balance. Rank is every balance on the board, sorted, and every balance shrinks 2% a day.

The price of anything, ever

One formula covers every case on this site:

you pay = (what the spot costs) − (what you already hold)
  • New here? You hold $0, so you pay the full price. Minimum opening stake is $5.
  • Already on the board? You pay the gap. If you hold $40 and first place needs $101, you pay $61 — not $101.
  • Just want more time? Add anything from $1. It buys runway even when it doesn’t move you up.

Sites like this usually make you re-buy the whole rank every time, and give the “pay only the difference” discount to incumbents only. We don’t. Money you put in stays in.

The burn

Every day, a listing loses 2% of the stake it last paid up to — at least $1. That rate is fixed the moment you pay and recalculated on your next payment.

StakeBurn/dayRunway
$5$15 days
$20$120 days
$50$150 days
$200$450 days
$1,000$2050 days
$10,000$20050 days

Above $50, everyone gets roughly the same 50 days regardless of size — money buys you height, not time. Below $50 the $1/day floor bites, which is how the bottom of the board stays clear of things nobody has thought about in a year.

Balances step down once a day, not continuously, so the number you see is the number you get for the next 24 hours.

Why anything expires at all

Because a leaderboard where placement is permanent stops being a leaderboard. Whoever shows up first with the most money owns the top forever, dead products squat on ranks they stopped caring about, and the price of visibility only ever goes up.

Under a burn, the top of the board is rented. Today’s price is set by who wants it today. If nobody tops up, first place gets cheaper every morning.

What you can list

  • A product website, or an X @handle.
  • No chat or invite links — Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Slack. This is a board for products and profiles, not group chats.
  • No adult content. No link shorteners.
  • Query strings are stripped, so affiliate and tracking URLs don’t work. example.com/pricing and example.com/blog are the same listing — you cannot buy two slots for one site.
  • Platform links are keyed by path, so two GitHub repos or two App Store apps are two separate listings.
  • Whole US dollars, up to $999,999. Equal balances keep their order — whoever got there first stays higher.

After you pay

  • A completed payment is what claims the rank. Nothing before that.
  • You get a private console link, once. It shows your runway, your clicks, where they came from, and your rank over time — and it lets you top up. Nobody can send it to you again, so keep it.
  • Clicks go to your link through a redirect on this site, so the counter is first-party. Repeat clicks from one visitor inside an hour, and obvious bots, don’t count.
  • When your balance hits zero the listing moves to the archive with its history intact. Pay anything and it comes straight back.

Note

This is a working scaffold, not a business. Payments are stubbed by default — the checkout page says so, and no card is ever charged.