This morning, holding position one on outbid.lol costs $15,000. Position two is $14,028. The gap between them is not editorial judgement, domain authority or anything a search engine would recognise. It is $972.
The site launched on 19 August at 11:08 PM, built by Jonathan Wilke, a German indie hacker who also runs supastarter. Five days later its own counter reads $189,992 in revenue and 1.27 million visitors. It broke its analytics provider on day two and had to switch to a different one mid-flight. Somebody offered $100,000 to buy the whole thing. At least ten copycats appeared within twenty-four hours.
The mechanic is one sentence: submit a URL, pay an amount, and your amount is your rank. Pay more than the person above you and you take their spot. Pay less than #1 and you still get listed, just lower. No refunds, no editorial review, no revenue share.
Everyone in SEO has now seen it. What almost nobody has done is check what the links look like.
The links are sponsored, and that settles the interesting question
I pulled the outbound links off the board. Every listing resolves to something like https://see.io/?utm_source=outbid carrying rel="sponsored noopener noreferrer".
That is the correct implementation, and it is worth saying plainly: outbid.lol is not selling links. It is selling placement, has qualified the links exactly the way Google’s spam policies require, and has attached a UTM so bidders can see the traffic in their own analytics. There is no PageRank leaking through, by design.
So if you were about to expense a bid as a link-building line item, don’t. Google’s link spam policy treats paid links that pass ranking signals as manipulation. Correctly qualified sponsored links are fine and pass nothing. You cannot have both, and the operators here picked the side that keeps everybody out of trouble. If you want the version of this argument that applies to every paid placement you have ever been pitched, what is link building covers where the line sits.
What you are buying is an ad. Price it like one.
The click math, with the numbers the board actually publishes
Each listing shows its own click counter, which makes this the rare paid channel where you can partly audit the seller’s claims before you spend.
| Listing | Bid | Clicks shown | Rough cost per click |
|---|---|---|---|
| see.io (#1) | $15,000 | 18,257 | $0.82 |
| outrank.so (#4) | $13,005 | 14,332 | $0.91 |
| trycomp.ai (#7) | $10,000 | 12,998 | $0.77 |
| modulate.ai (#8) | $3,560 | 456 | $7.81 |
| context.dev (#9) | $3,555 | 1,085 | $3.28 |
Under a dollar a click for the top three is genuinely cheap against B2B software CPCs on Google Ads. Positions eight and nine, bought later at a quarter of the price, are running at four to ten times the cost per click. That is the shape of the whole thing: the money arrived, the crowd arrived, and then the crowd started leaving while the prices stayed high.
CrowdReply, who held #1 at $12,700, posted that they got 6,550 clicks, 1,800 signups, 50+ booked demos and about $50k a month in pipeline. Another bidder, MakerThrive, says $42 sent 64,000 people to their site and produced $29,000 in a day. Both of those are self-reported on X and republished by the site that benefits from them. Treat them as advertising, because that is what they are.
Even taking them at face value, notice what actually produced the result. CrowdReply’s own summary lists “trended on X” before the click count. The board was the excuse; the audience was on X and Hacker News. A $12,700 bid that nobody screenshots is a $12,700 banner ad on a page with a leaderboard on it.
Why it spread, which is the part worth stealing
Strip away the novelty and this is the Million Dollar Homepage with an eviction rule bolted on. That one addition changes everything.
The 2005 original sold pixels once and then sat there. Outbid.lol never finishes. Any position can be taken at any moment, which means every buyer has a permanent reason to check the page, and a reason to tell people they are at the top before somebody knocks them off. The site markets itself through the vanity of the people paying for it. Then the price war becomes the story, the story brings the traffic, and the traffic justifies the next bid.
It also has no editorial layer, and that is deliberate. There is no “best SEO agencies of 2026” pretence, no application form, no vetting. Which is refreshing, and also the reason nobody should read the board as a recommendation. A leaderboard sorted by payment tells you who had budget on a Tuesday. If you want the version with actual criteria, we keep one in how to evaluate SEO agencies, and the failure modes in signs of a bad SEO agency.
The uncomfortable bit for anyone selling “top 10” placements: outbid.lol is honest about being pay-to-rank, and most directories are not.
What decays and what doesn’t
Attention markets have a half-life measured in days. The traffic curve on a viral board runs down as the news cycle moves, and the price of #1 does not fall with it. Whoever pays $15,000 next week is buying a smaller audience than the person who paid $12,700 last week.
Three things survive the decay, and they are the reason this is not purely a waste of money.
Your listing page keeps existing. On boards that build a real page per listing, that is an indexable URL with your name, description and a link on it, long after the traffic dries up. Secondary coverage keeps existing too. Articles about the craze, including this one, name the companies that bought the top spots, and some of those mentions become genuine editorial links that nobody paid for. That second-order effect is the only part of this with real SEO value, and it accrues to whoever does something interesting enough to write about, not to whoever bids highest.
The third is entity association. Boards like this get scraped, quoted and summarised, and language models are unusually fond of anything shaped like a ranked list. Whether that moves you in an AI answer is not something anybody can prove yet, and I would not spend on it as a theory. We wrote up what can currently be measured in how to get cited in AI overviews.
The niche clones changed the math
Ten copycats in a day was the early count and it kept going. Most are generic. The interesting ones narrowed the audience instead of chasing the same crowd.
topseos.lol is the one aimed at this industry: SEO agencies, freelancers and consultants, SEO tools and apps, and the X profiles of people who do this for a living. Same core rule, rank is the bid, but built for a room where everybody is already arguing about what position one is worth.
Disclosure: topseos.lol is a side project of ours. Discount the enthusiasm accordingly.
The economics are different at this scale and that is the whole point. Listings start at $3 and move in $1 steps. Holding #1 currently costs $150, which is what fatjoe.com paid. Topping up your own listing charges the difference rather than the full amount again, so climbing is cheap if you already hold a spot. Names, descriptions and icons are pulled straight from your homepage title tag, meta description and favicon, which means a lazy meta description becomes your ad copy in front of an audience of SEOs. Fix it before you sign up, or don’t and provide the rest of us with entertainment. Our meta descriptions guide exists for exactly this.
The relevant difference for anyone reading this site: listing pages carry a followable link, not a sponsored one, and they are indexable pages rather than rows in a table. On outbid.lol the link is rel="sponsored" and passes nothing. That distinction is the only technical reason to prefer one board over another, and you should check it yourself with view-source on any board that asks for your money.
The audience is smaller by orders of magnitude. Twenty-six listings and about 5,000 visitors since launch on 21 August, against outbid’s 1.27 million. Nobody is booking fifty demos off it. At $3 to $150, nobody needs to.
Where I would and would not spend
If you sell software to founders and developers and you have a marketing budget with a five-figure experiment line in it, the top of outbid.lol was defensible in week one and is getting less defensible every day. Bid on measured cost per click against your existing paid channels, not on the screenshot.
If you run an agency and you are looking at four figures for a leaderboard spot, put it into link building or a technical audit instead. The clicks are curiosity clicks. They convert like display traffic, because that is what they are, and an agency sale needs intent that a leaderboard cannot manufacture.
If the number is under $50, stop doing arithmetic. A niche board at $10 costs less than an hour of anyone’s time, gives you a page with a real link, and puts your name in front of people who buy what you sell. The correct amount of analysis for a $10 decision is none.
And if you are tempted to build your own clone: the mechanic is trivially copyable, which is exactly why the tenth one made no money. What outbid.lol had was five days of being first.
Sources: outbid.lol leaderboard and about page, figures as displayed on 24 August 2026; topseos.lol rules; Google Search Central, Link spam policy; Hacker News discussion. Revenue, click and conversion figures are self-reported by the operators and bidders.
