llms.txt
# BidSurvivor
> A live ad auction with a clock on it — also described as a time-boxed ad
> auction, an ad slot auction, or bidding on ad space; all four name the same
> thing. The board is two tiles, one for
> each half of the UTC day. Whoever holds a tile owns the front of the page for
> those twelve hours — logo, name, one line, and a direct link to their own
> site. Then the slot ends and it belongs to somebody else.
## The rules, exactly
- The board is 2 slots, each twelve hours of the UTC day: 00:00-12:00 and
12:00-24:00 UTC. There are two places a day, not twenty-four.
- The first brand into an empty slot pays nothing. Not a trial or a discount: an
empty slot has no standing bid to beat, so any amount takes it, zero included.
- To take an occupied slot you must beat its standing bid. You are charged
immediately and your logo replaces theirs. The floor is $1.00 USD and the
ceiling is $5,000 — no bid can exceed it.
- If you fail to beat it you are charged nothing. The card authorisation is
released.
- If somebody outbids you later, you lose the slot AND the money. There is no
refund. You paid for the time you held, and you held it.
- Whoever holds a slot when it ends keeps it permanently. Nobody can buy history.
- Winning also keeps you on the Hall of Survivors — three rolling boards showing
the biggest bids of the last 7 days, 30 days and a year, ranked and
filterable by category. They hold up to 100 names, but a
period cannot list more slots than it contains: 14 for the
7 days, 60 for the 30 days, 100 for
the year. A brand that takes the lead on a live slot appears there the
moment it bids.
- Slots can be booked up to 7 days ahead.
- Every visitor starts with $100 of house credit — before signing up, no card
and no account. Bids inside it cost nothing; credit is spent only by a bid
that actually wins. It lives in the browser until you sign up, which is what
makes it follow you instead.
- The code WELCOME10 adds a further $10 to a verified account, once, on top of
that grant — so a new account redeeming it has $110 to bid with. It is entered
under "Your bids" in the site menu.
- There is no subscription, no minimum spend and no contract.
- Currency is USD throughout.
## What is published
Visitor counts, card opens, click-throughs and the open-to-click rate are
published live on the front page (https://bidsurvivor.space/), and each brand's own counts are on
its page (https://bidsurvivor.space/b/<id>). "Opens" means a card was opened;
"visits" means somebody actually left for the brand's own site. They are counted
and shown separately because only the second is worth anything to an advertiser.
## Pages
- [The board](https://bidsurvivor.space/): the live auction, both slots of today
- [About](https://bidsurvivor.space/about): what this is and who runs it
- [Pricing and rules](https://bidsurvivor.space/faq): the questions people actually ask
- [Privacy](https://bidsurvivor.space/privacy): what is stored, who receives it, how to delete it
- [Brands on the board](https://bidsurvivor.space/b.md): every brand that has held or contested a
slot, by category, with what each placement delivered. Each has a page of its
own at https://bidsurvivor.space/b/<id> and a markdown twin at https://bidsurvivor.space/b/<id>.md showing what it
paid, its card opens and click-throughs, and who it took the slot from. A
brand marked "placed free" was put there by us and has never bid.
- [AI crawler log](https://bidsurvivor.space/reports/crawlers): server-log data, published daily —
which crawlers actually fetched a page here, how many times, and what share
took the .md twin rather than the HTML. Not sampled, not estimated.
- [Ad price index](https://bidsurvivor.space/price-index): what a twelve-hour slot actually sold
for, week by week, next to published per-click rates for Google, Meta,
display and newsletter sponsorship. Settled prices, not rate cards; a week
with too few bids to have a middle says so instead of quoting one.
- [Tools](https://bidsurvivor.space/tools): two free calculators — what an ad budget buys and
whether it buys enough to prove anything, and which of your backlinks have
ever sent a real visitor. No account, no paid crawl data.
- [Contact](https://bidsurvivor.space/contact): cyber.breach.space@gmail.com
- [Blog](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog): essays with checkable sources. Every article is
also plain markdown — add .md to any URL, e.g. https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/how-bidsurvivor-works.md,
or https://bidsurvivor.space/blog.md for the index.
## Writing
- [How many times can the same people see your ad?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/ad-fatigue-in-a-small-audience): Frequency caps assume an audience big enough to rotate through. What happens when yours is not, how to tell fatigue from a bad message, and what to fix first.
- [What does it actually cost to sponsor a small podcast?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/podcast-sponsorship-on-a-small-budget): Real rate ranges for shows under 5,000 downloads, why CPM is the wrong unit here, the attribution problem nobody solves, and how to test one for under $200.
- [Should a domain nobody has heard of buy traffic or earn it?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/seo-vs-ads-on-a-new-domain): A new domain cannot rank for months and cannot afford to wait. What the sandbox period really is, what each channel costs in weeks, and the order that works.
- [How do you know which channel worked when you are the whole team?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/marketing-attribution-for-one-person): Attribution models were built for companies with analysts. What a one-person team can measure, the two questions worth answering, and what to stop tracking.
- [Your ad was seen 40,000 times. Was it?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-an-ad-impression-actually-counts): An ad impression is a delivery receipt, not a pair of eyes. What the viewability standard requires, why the gap matters at small budgets, and what to check.
- [Is retargeting worth it when only 300 people visited?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/retargeting-with-a-small-audience): Why retargeting stops working below a few thousand monthly visitors, what platforms will not tell you about minimum audience sizes, and what to run instead.
- [How should you price a slot nobody has bought before?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-an-ad-slot-is-worth-to-a-buyer): What a placement is worth before anyone has paid for one, why sellers guess high and buyers guess low, and the two numbers that settle the question honestly.
- [Should you test one message properly or five badly?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/one-message-or-many): Splitting a small budget across five variants feels thorough and answers nothing. The arithmetic of how many messages a budget can genuinely separate at all.
- [How do you know when to stop a campaign that isn't working?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/when-to-stop-a-campaign): Most small campaigns die by drift rather than by decision. The three stopping rules to write down before you spend, and the sunk-cost arguments to ignore.
- [What can you actually learn from a visitor who has never heard of you?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-cold-traffic-tells-you): Cold traffic answers a narrower question than most founders ask of it. What a stranger's click proves, what it cannot, and why warm numbers flatter you.
- [Why does it cost so much more to advertise to businesses?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/why-b2b-ad-costs-are-higher): B2B ad costs run several times consumer rates on every channel. The auction arithmetic behind that, and why the expensive click is often still the cheaper one.
- [Should you run ads before the product exists?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/advertising-before-launch): When advertising before launch buys real information and when it only buys a list, what a waitlist signup proves, and the honest cost of finding out early.
- [Does a domain rating actually predict anything useful?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/does-domain-rating-predict-traffic): What a domain rating measures, what it correlates with, and why a site can hold a respectable score while sending nobody anywhere. Including our own number.
- [What counts as a good click rate when you are small?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/click-rate-benchmarks-for-small-budgets): Real click rate benchmarks by channel, why a small advertiser's number is not comparable to a published average, and the sample size before yours means much.
- [How do you test ad copy before paying for a single click?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/test-ad-copy-before-you-pay-for-clicks): Four ways to test ad copy without buying traffic first, what each one can and cannot tell you, and the point at which you have to stop asking and start paying.
- [The first hundred brands to hold a slot](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/the-first-hundred-brands-on-the-board): A hundred numbered records, struck in the order brands first held a slot, with the figures frozen at the moment each was issued and never recomputed after.
- [Set a ceiling once and stop watching the auction](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/introducing-outbid-guard): The real cost of an auction is not money, it is attention. Outbid Guard takes a slot back for you up to a price you set, and tells you plainly when it cannot.
- [What a click actually sold for this week](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/introducing-the-ad-price-index): Ad prices are published as rate cards and vendor averages. Here is the other thing: settled prices from a live auction, week by week, with the gaps left in.
- [What is a click actually worth to you?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-is-a-click-worth-to-you): Before comparing ad prices, work out what one visitor is worth. The unit economics arithmetic that decides whether any channel is affordable, in four numbers.
- [What time of day should your ad actually run?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-time-of-day-should-your-ad-run): If you can only afford one block of hours, which block? What ad scheduling can and cannot tell you when you have no historical data to schedule against.
- [Are startup directories worth submitting to?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/are-startup-directories-worth-submitting-to): Some directories send real people, most send nothing, and a few can hurt you. A sorting rule for which ones deserve an afternoon, and how to check afterwards.
- [BidSurvivor vs EthicalAds: privacy, transparency, and the real differences](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/bidsurvivor-vs-ethicalads): BidSurvivor and EthicalAds both reject tracking. Where they differ: pricing, reach, data transparency, and what each will tell you about your own results.
- [BidSurvivor vs Google Ads: when the small option beats the big one](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/bidsurvivor-vs-google-ads): BidSurvivor and Google Ads are different kinds of platform: one tests messages for free, the other scales proven ones at $5+ a click. When each is right.
- [BidSurvivor vs Carbon Ads: the honest trade-offs](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/bidsurvivor-vs-carbon-ads): BidSurvivor and Carbon Ads compared for small advertisers: minimum spend, audience, data transparency, and what each one is actually good at, side by side.
- [BidSurvivor vs BuySellAds: what each one actually tells you](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/bidsurvivor-vs-buysellads): BidSurvivor and BuySellAds compared for small advertisers: minimum spend, data transparency, how fast you learn whether the money worked, and what each hides.
- [Best alternatives to Google Ads in 2026](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/best-alternatives-to-google-ads): The best alternatives to Google Ads when $5+ a click is too much, ranked by how much search intent they keep and how fast they give a trustworthy result.
- [Best free marketing tools for bootstrapped startups in 2026](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/best-free-marketing-tools-for-bootstrapped-startups): Free marketing tools that answer what the paid ones skip: whether AI can find you, what an ad budget buys, which backlinks work, and who publishes their rates.
- [Best advertising platforms for startups on a small budget in 2026](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/best-advertising-platforms-for-startups): The best advertising platforms for startups that cannot afford to waste a dollar, ranked by minimum spend, data transparency and how fast they tell the truth.
- [Attention marketplace startups and what they sell that ad networks do not](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/attention-marketplace-startups): Attention marketplace startups sell named presence on a page for a fixed time, not impressions or clicks. How it differs from ad networks and who builds it.
- [Contextual advertising for small sites and why it still works when cookies do not](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/contextual-advertising-for-small-sites): Contextual advertising matches ads to page content, not user profiles. For small sites with no tracking data it is often the only model that works. Compared.
- [How to advertise a SaaS product cheaply when nobody knows you exist](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/advertise-saas-product-cheaply): Cheap SaaS advertising is not a smaller version of the expensive kind: other channels, other metrics, a different idea of success. What works under $100.
- [Cheap alternatives to Google Ads for startups that have not found product-market fit](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/cheap-alternative-to-google-ads-for-startups): Google Ads is built for businesses that already know what converts. If you are still finding out, these cheaper alternatives trade scale for signal, by spend.
- [How to buy an hour of advertising and what you get for it](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/buy-an-hour-of-advertising): Buying an hour of advertising is now literally possible. How time-denominated ad slots work, what an hour of presence costs, and when a short window wins.
- [Hourly ad slots: the smallest unit of advertising you can buy](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/hourly-ad-slots): Hourly ad slots sell a fixed block of time on a page instead of clicks or impressions. Why the format exists, what it costs, when a short slot beats a budget.
- [SES deliverability for newsletters: the problem nobody tells you about](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/ses-deliverability-for-newsletters): Amazon SES is cheap but its newsletter deliverability is mediocre at best. Why, what goes wrong, and what to use instead with 20k subscribers and no revenue.
- [Most of your backlinks have never sent a single visitor](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/backlinks-that-never-sent-a-visitor): A link that has never sent a human is a link doing one job instead of two. How to find the silent ones, and what to do about them once you have the list.
- [How many clicks before a conversion rate means anything?](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/how-many-clicks-before-a-conversion-rate-means-anything): A conversion rate from 40 clicks is noise wearing a percentage sign. The sample size arithmetic for small advertisers, and what to do when you cannot afford it.
- [90 Day Small Startup Advertising: Founder Led Tests Under $500](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/small-startup-advertising): Start with founder led content, one small paid test, and basic email or SEO. Run a 90 day experiment, validate messaging for $100–$500, and use...
- [Developer tool marketing and the ad-blocking audience, revisited](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/developer-tool-marketing-and-the-ad-blocking-audience): Your audience blocks ads and distrusts copy on principle. What still reaches them is narrow, and most of it depends on claims they can check themselves.
- [Newsletter advertising in the week Google changed Search again](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/newsletter-advertising-after-the-search-changes): Search sent fewer clicks again this month, which makes an inbox look safer than it is. What a newsletter slot is worth now, and how to price one honestly.
- [Advertising an AI product now that AI is in every search result](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/advertising-an-ai-product-when-ai-is-everywhere): Every search result now says AI, and so does every rival. What still separates an AI product when the word itself has stopped carrying any signal at all.
- [Chrome extension marketing when the Web Store is your only traffic](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/chrome-extension-marketing-beyond-the-web-store): Web Store search is one of the last places an AI Overview cannot stand between you and the user. What that is worth, and the channels that feed into it.
- [Sponsored links, nofollow, dofollow: what a paid placement should give you](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/sponsored-nofollow-dofollow-paid-placement-links): Why a paid placement should give you a rel=sponsored link rather than a dofollow one, per Google's own rules, and what a public brand page is worth instead.
- [Outbid: what actually happens to the brand that lost the slot](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/outbid-what-happens-to-the-brand-that-lost): Being outbid on a time-boxed ad slot means losing the slot and the money, with no refund. A bid that fails costs nothing. Why the two events differ so much.
- [Paid vs organic when search sends fewer clicks than it used to](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/paid-vs-organic-when-search-sends-fewer-clicks): If a top ranking now sends 61% fewer clicks, the arithmetic that made organic obviously cheaper than paid has moved. Working it through, with the new numbers.
- [House credit: how $100 you did not ask for changes what you test](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/house-credit-changes-what-you-test): Every visitor starts with $100 of house credit before signing up. The interesting effect is not the money — it is which experiments become thinkable at all.
- [Why a bid ceiling makes an auction fairer, not smaller](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/why-a-bid-ceiling-makes-an-auction-fairer): A hard cap on every bid reads like a limit on the seller's upside. It is really a promise to the smallest bidder, and it changes who turns up at all to bid.
- [What a twelve-hour ad slot costs, in every unit that matters](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-a-twelve-hour-ad-slot-costs): The same twelve-hour ad slot priced per hour, per open, per click and per thousand visitors, with worked hypotheticals, and what changes when you are outbid.
- [The Hall of Survivors as a build-in-public artefact](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/hall-of-survivors-as-a-build-in-public-artefact): The Hall of Survivors is a public, dated record of who held an ad slot and what it cost — three rolling boards, a live leader, and a page you can link to.
- [Intent outreach without a data broker, and without pretending otherwise](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/intent-outreach-without-a-data-broker): Published addresses first, a contact database only when there is none, the source disclosed in every message, and a one-click way out of the list for all.
- [Community listening: finding the thread where your buyer is asking](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/community-listening-find-the-thread): Community listening is reading before posting: finding the thread where someone is describing the problem you solve, answering it, and measuring what came back.
- [What 500 followers actually buys you, counted honestly](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/what-500-followers-actually-buys-you): The indie playbooks promise 500 to 5,000 followers in a year. What a small audience honestly converts to, what it cannot do, and how to use it better.
- [Build in public marketing: publish the ad numbers, not just the MRR](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/build-in-public-marketing-numbers): Makers who post MRR screenshots already believe in showing figures. The marketing numbers — spend, clicks, visits — are rarer, and far more useful to read.
- [The two-channel rule: why indie founders should run two, not seven](https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/
