Sponsor a placement

Sponsor lets you bid for a slot in a sponsored placement. Every ad is reviewed by a moderator before it shows and is always labelled Sponsored. The area has six tabs: Placements, Results, My bids, Creatives, Wallet and Profile.

1. Apply to advertise and wait for an admin to approve you.
2. Set up your Profile once and agree to the Sponsor Terms.
3. Add money in Wallet. A bid locks its amount; being outbid releases it at once. If you win, you are charged when bidding closes. Bids are final.
4. Open a slot from Placements and slide to place a bid.
5. Once you win, Upload your ad (from Creatives), preview it, and press Send for review. It must follow the Ad Policy.

Sponsors cannot buy a review: paying for a slot has no effect on any artifact's review.

The Rail placement is a 4:5 card in the right-hand column of artifact pages, the Community list and Community threads, under the thread's other cards. Upload exactly 1200 × 1500 pixels, image or video (video at most 4 MB, with a poster). It shows on desktop only, is not shown on screens narrower than 1024 pixels, and cannot link to an artifact or to an install or download.

See how your ads did

Results shows impressions, clicks, click-through rate and how many of your ads are showing now, for the last week, month or three months. Below the daily chart are the numbers by placement, by campaign (each slot you won; open one for its own page) and by ad. Download CSV gives one row per ad per day.

• An impression is half the ad on screen for a second. A click is a visit to your landing page.
• Each visitor counts once per ad per UTC day, by a hash of their network address; the address itself is never stored. People who share one office network count once, so the numbers lean low, never high.
• Crawlers, link prefetches and "Preview on the site" pages are never counted. Today's numbers are still counting.
• An ad whose slot has finished shows as Ended, even if it was live until the end.

Set up before you bid

Code: profile_required, terms_not_accepted

Bidding needs a sponsor profile and your agreement to the current Sponsor Terms. Finish Profile. If the terms changed, reload and agree again.

The name on your profile appears beside your ad. It is copied when you submit the ad, so renaming your profile later does not change an ad already sent. A name that reads as Deftro is refused. A placement nobody won, or an ad whose image or video cannot load, shows nothing.

The slot is not taking bids

Code: placement_closed, auction_not_open, auction_closed

The placement was switched off (locked money is released), bidding has not opened yet (the slot shows when it opens), or bidding has ended. Pick another slot.

The bid amount was refused

Code: bid_too_low, insufficient_funds, invalid_amount

Bid at least the amount the message names, keep enough unlocked money in your wallet, and use a positive amount within the maximum.

Adding funds failed

Code: payments_unavailable, payment_failed

payments_unavailable means adding money is not set up on this site yet. payment_failed means your payment was declined and nothing was added: try again or use another method.

The ad was refused

Code: invalid_media, invalid_landing_url, incomplete_ad, media_unavailable

• Images must be PNG, JPEG or WebP at the size the placement asks for; videos MP4 or WebM. SVG, GIF and animated images are refused.
• The landing page must be an https address on a public website, with no IP address, port, user name or password.
• Before sending, choose the kind of ad, upload its image or video (plus a poster for video; at most 20 seconds and 8 MB, or 4 MB on the Rail), and add a headline and landing page. A short line of text is optional.
• If the media host could not be reached, try again in a moment.

Files over the size limit: see File and limit refusals.