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Bidding and budgets

Updated July 17, 2026

Your bid buys share of voice. Your daily budget is a hard cap. Both are exact rules rather than knobs with vibes, so this page states them exactly.

What a bid buys

Share of voice is your bid divided by the total of all live bids, and it is your probability of holding any given sponsored moment. Delivery converges to it over time: out of rotation this minute is not losing, it is the other bidders receiving their share. If you want a larger share, raise the bid; the dashboard shows the current top bid and a suggested bid one cent above it.

Advertiser A 60%
$6.00
Advertiser B 30%
$3.00
Advertiser C 10%
$1.00
drawn, weighted by bid
Aslot 1
Aslot 2
Bslot 3
An illustration with round numbers. Three bids make a $10 pot; each bid buys its share of voice (bid / pot), and three slots are drawn with replacement - which is why Advertiser A can hold two slots, and why a slot is a draw, not a rank.

What you pay

First-price, per verified view: when your line crosses the visibility threshold on a developer's screen, you pay your bid at its value in that moment. A click bills a multiple of that placement's impression price. Placements are weighted - a view in the chat banner, where the line sits in the developer's reading path, costs more than one in the status bar. Nothing bills without verification: What counts as an impression.

The daily budget is a hard cap

The budget stops spend for the UTC day, full stop. Your campaign serves at its full share of voice until the day's spend reaches the budget, then leaves the auction for the rest of that day, with at most about a minute of lag from serving caches. The spend counter resets at midnight UTC. It is not a smoothing algorithm and we will not pretend it spreads spend across the day - what it guarantees is that a day never costs more than you capped it at.

Changing bids and budgets

Both can be changed at any time without re-review - only editing the line itself sends a campaign back through review (see One line, one link). A budget increase must be covered by your wallet balance, so a campaign can never promise money the wallet does not hold. Pausing takes effect immediately - see Turning it off.

Reading the market

The pot, the top bid, your rank, and how many campaigns are live are all in the dashboard. In a young market the pot can be small - which cuts both ways: modest bids buy real share of voice today (see How the auction works).

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