A discovery site that sells its top result is an advertising page wearing a ranking's clothes. This is what Product Billboards sells instead, and where the line sits.
What is for sale
- One global sponsor slot at position #4 on the home feed, sold as a 24-hour placement. One, not a block — position #4 and nothing else.
- One category sponsor slot at position #3 in each category feed, likewise 24 hours, and likewise the only buyable position in that feed.
- A one-time listing fee to put a billboard up at all, waived for the first fifty listings.
- A founder subscription for analytics and AMA replies on your own listing.
What is not
Every other position in the feed, at any price. Not the top three — every single one. The sponsored slot is a fixed index in the layout rather than a score adjustment, so it is inserted into the list and pushes the organic order down by one; it does not take anyone's place. There is no lever that moves a listing up the organic order for money, because nothing about a paid slot touches the ranking formula.
The one exception to the fixed index is the Random deck, which is a shuffle rather than a ranking. Nothing there is ordered by score, so a sponsored billboard can land anywhere in it. It stays badged wherever it lands.
How a sponsored slot is priced
Sponsorship starts at a $24/day floor and moves weekly: the price steps up by $5 the week after a slot sells out for a full week, and eases back toward the floor when it does not. Demand sets it, we do not negotiate it, and the current number is always the one shown on the pricing page.
How it is disclosed
Every sponsored placement carries a visible "Sponsored" badge in the feed itself — at the placement, not in a footnote — and the JSON and Markdown representations of the feed carry the same flag, so an agent summarising the page cannot miss what a person can see. The standard we hold ourselves to is the FTC's: a material connection has to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, at the point of the claim. Their Endorsement Guides FAQ is the plain-English version, and 16 CFR Part 255 is the rule itself.
Outbound links
Links from a billboard to the product go straight to the founder's own site, tagged with UTM parameters so the founder can attribute the traffic. Product Billboards runs no affiliate programme and earns no commission on anything you click through to. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page carrying the links, above the fold, before it is disclosed anywhere else.