Terms of Service

Payola (the “Service”) is operated by Payola LLC of 1550 Wewatta St, Denver, CO 80202, USA (“we”, “us”). These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) form a binding agreement between us and you, whether you are reading the board, clicking a listing, or paying to place one.

By using the Service you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company or other organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

You must be at least 18 years old, and legally able to enter a contract, to pay for a listing.

Payola is a public leaderboard of links whose order is determined solely by how much money each listing holds. It is paid placement, disclosed as such. Position on the board reflects nothing except a payment and the passage of time.

We do not review, test, endorse, verify, rate, or vouch for any listing, any linked site, or anyone who places one. We do not check whether a listing’s claims are true, whether its product works, or whether its operator is who they say they are. A high rank means someone paid more than the listing below it. That is the whole of the signal.

Nothing on the board is advice — financial, professional, or otherwise — and nothing on it should be treated as a recommendation to buy, download, install, fund, or trust anything.

Payola is published as a working scaffold. In its default configuration checkout is stubbed: the checkout page says so on its face, no payment provider is contacted, no payment instrument is collected, and no money moves. Listings created through the stub carry no monetary value whatsoever and confer no rights beyond what these Terms describe.

Where the Service is configured to take real payments, it does so through Stripe, Inc. (United States), and §6 applies in full. The checkout page will say which of the two you are in before you commit to anything. If it says no money moves, no money moves.

We may run the Service with no service levels, no uptime commitment, and no notice period, and may reset, migrate, or discontinue the board (§13).

The mechanics are described in plain language on How it works, and that description is incorporated into these Terms. In summary, and as operative terms:

• You buy a balance, not a rank. Rank is every live balance on the board, sorted high to low.
• Price. What you pay is the cost of the position you are aiming at, less whatever balance you already hold. All amounts are whole US dollars.
• Minimums and maximum. An opening stake is at least $5; a top-up is at least $1; a single listing’s balance is capped at $999,999.
• The burn. A listing loses 2% of its last-anchored balance every day, with a floor of $1 per day. The daily figure is fixed at the moment of payment and recalculated on the next one. Balances step down on whole-day boundaries.
• Expiry. At a balance of $0 a listing is archived. It keeps its history, and any subsequent payment revives it, but it loses its tie-break seniority on revival.
• Ties. Equal balances are ordered by who reached the board first.
• Identity of a listing. Targets are normalised before they are keyed, so query strings are discarded and a bare host is one listing. You cannot buy two positions for the same target, and you may end up topping up an existing listing rather than creating a new one.

We may change these parameters prospectively (§14). We will not retroactively reduce a balance you have already paid for, other than by the burn as it was described to you at the time you paid.

The rank shown to you before payment is a projection calculated from the board as it stood at that moment. The board is live and other people are paying into it. Between your quote and your settlement, another payment may land and place that listing above you.

When that happens, your payment is still applied, in full, at the amount you agreed to pay, and it buys exactly the balance you paid for — you simply land lower than the projection. The confirmation will tell you plainly that the board moved. This is not a defect, and it is not grounds for a refund. We do not discard money because the board changed, and we do not guarantee any particular position at any time.

Equally, no position is durable: any other participant may outrank you a moment later by paying more, and your own balance is burning down the entire time.

Where real payments are enabled, they are processed by Stripe, Inc. (United States). We never receive or store your full card number, and your use of the processor is subject to that processor’s own terms and privacy policy. A rank is claimed by a completed payment and by nothing before it.

All payments are final and non-refundable, in whole and in part, to the maximum extent permitted by law. This includes, without limitation, where:

• you are outranked immediately, or at any time after paying;
• your listing receives few clicks, no clicks, or fewer clicks than you expected;
• your balance burns to zero and the listing archives — that is the product working as described, not a failure of it;
• you change your mind, mistype a target, pay more than you intended, or pay for a target you do not control;
• we remove your listing under §7 or §9, or suspend or discontinue the Service under §13.

Where you have a non-waivable statutory right to a refund or to cancel — for example certain consumer rights — nothing here limits it, and you should contact us at legal@payola.lol. By buying a listing that goes live immediately, you request that performance begin at once and acknowledge that any statutory cooling-off right may be lost on full performance.

If you initiate a chargeback or payment dispute, we may immediately remove the listing, void its balance without refund of any other amount, and refuse further listings from you. We may present these Terms and our records of your payment and listing as evidence in the dispute.

Prices are exclusive of any taxes unless stated otherwise, and you are responsible for any taxes arising from your purchase other than taxes on our income.

You may list a website or a public profile. You represent and warrant that, for every listing you pay for:

• you own or are authorised to promote the target, and to use any name, mark, logo, icon or description that appears with it;
• the target and everything you submit with it complies with all applicable law;
• the tagline you supply (up to 140 characters) and the handle you supply are accurate, are yours to give, and are not deceptive.

You may not use the Service to list, promote, or link to:

• adult or sexually explicit material;
• chat, group or invite links (for example Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger or Slack invitations);
• link shorteners, redirectors, or cloaked destinations;
• malware, phishing, credential harvesting, scams, fake stores, or anything designed to deceive a visitor about who they are dealing with;
• illegal goods or services, controlled substances, weapons, stolen data, or material that infringes someone else’s intellectual property;
• content that is unlawfully hateful, harassing, defamatory, or that sexualises minors in any way;
• financial solicitations, token sales, or investment offers that you are not licensed to make;
• anything you do not have the right to promote, including someone else’s site or profile listed to their detriment.

Some of this is enforced automatically at submission, before any money is taken. That enforcement is a blocklist, it is incomplete by construction, and the fact that a target was accepted is not a finding that it complies with these Terms. We may remove any listing that does not, at any time, without notice and without refund.

You also may not: interfere with the Service or its rate limits; automate bidding or clicking; inflate, fabricate, or manipulate click counts; circumvent target normalisation to occupy multiple positions for one target; scrape beyond the documented public endpoints; probe or attack the Service; or use the Service to attack anyone else.

When your first payment settles we establish a private, browser-bound Owner Console session. The clean /console page shows your runway, clicks, referrers and rank history, and it is how you top up.

You are responsible for everything done through your console session. Losing the session does not entitle you to a refund, a replacement listing, or a transfer of the balance.

You keep whatever rights you already have in what you submit. By submitting a target, a tagline or a handle, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and display that material — together with the target’s title and icon as retrieved from the target itself — on the board, in the archive, in the activity feed, in our public API, and in reasonable promotion of the Service. The licence lasts as long as we retain the record, which outlives the listing (see the Privacy Policy on retention).

When a listing is created we fetch the target once, from our servers, to find its icon. The board then displays that icon from the target’s own host.

The Payola name, design, copy and code are ours or our licensors’. Nothing in these Terms transfers them to you, and paying for a listing does not license our branding.

Complaints. If you believe a listing infringes your rights, impersonates you, or breaches §7, write to abuse@payola.lol with the listing URL, what is wrong with it, and your contact details — and, for a copyright claim, an identification of the work, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorised, a statement under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you are authorised to act, and your signature. We aim to review complaints promptly. We may remove a listing while we look at it. We run no formal appeals process, and a removal under this clause carries no refund.

Clicks are counted first-party: a visitor going to your target passes through a redirect on this site, which appends a ref=payola parameter to the outbound URL. Repeat clicks from the same visitor within 60 minutes are not counted twice, and traffic we identify as automated is recorded but excluded from the totals you see.

These figures are provided as-is, for information. They are a best effort at honest measurement, not an audited metric, and they will not match your own analytics. Nothing is billed on the basis of clicks, no minimum volume of clicks or impressions is promised, and we do not warrant that any figure is complete or accurate. We may adjust counts we believe to be manipulated, and we may change how counting works.

Every listing points somewhere we do not control. Following a link takes you out of the Service and into someone else’s hands, under their terms and their privacy practices. We are not responsible for those sites, their content, their security, or any dealing you have with them, and any transaction between you and a listed party is entirely between you and them.

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any data will be preserved.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost goodwill, lost traffic, lost data, or the cost of substitute services, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if we have been advised of the possibility.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you actually paid us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) $50.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case the exclusions apply to the extent permitted.

You will indemnify and hold us harmless against any claim, demand, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your listings, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your infringement of anyone else’s rights.

We may remove a listing, refuse a payment, block a target, restrict access, or suspend or terminate your use of the Service at any time, with or without notice, if we believe you have breached these Terms, if a listing exposes us or our users to legal or security risk, if a payment is disputed or fraudulent, or if we are required to by law.

We may also change, suspend, reset or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, at any time. Because the Service is published as a scaffold (§3), the board may be reset without notice and listings and balances may not survive. No refund arises under this clause.

Sections 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 survive termination.

We may amend these Terms. The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version. Material changes take effect for existing listings on the earlier of your next payment or 30 days after we post them; everything else takes effect when posted. Continued use after that is acceptance. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service — which, given the burn, will resolve itself.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and you and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of its courts. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of your own country’s law and may bring proceedings there where the law gives you that right.

Before filing anything, please write to legal@payola.lol. Most of what goes wrong here is a rank, a receipt, or a lost console session, and all three are faster to fix by email.

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and How it works, are the entire agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said before. If any provision is held unenforceable, it is severed and the rest stands. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship. We are not liable for failure to perform caused by events outside our reasonable control.

Notices to us go to legal@payola.lol. Notices to you are given by posting on payola.lol or, where we have one, by the console session associated with your listing.