How it works
Outshine is an auction. Here is exactly how a placement is sold, priced, awarded and billed — and what is deliberately not disclosed while bidding is open.
Step 1
Browse inventory by category, geography or day-part. Every placement publishes its reserve price and its bid increment before you commit anything.
Step 2
Bidding is open for a published window. The server tells you the minimum next bid and whether you hold the lead — never what a rival bid.
Step 3
When the auction closes the winner is selected by the server, ties broken by who bid first. You pay what the auction cleared at.
Step 4
Your creative runs for the period you won. Once it is live, the placement and its clearing price appear on the public leaderboard.
A placement is a specific advertising position on a specific surface: a homepage banner, a category slot, a search position, a featured card, a geographic slot or a time-slot. Each one publishes its terms before anybody bids — the reserve price, the bid increment, how many positions it carries, and how it is priced (a flat rate for the period, cost per thousand impressions, or cost per click).
A placement is sold in windows: a defined period during which the winning advert runs. Bidding opens and closes before that period begins, because a platform cannot sell a placement that has already started running.
While an auction is open you are told two things about it: the reserve price, and the minimum next bid. The minimum is computed by the server, every time you ask. Your browser never calculates it, and a figure you were shown a minute ago is not a figure the server has promised to honour — if somebody has bid since, your bid is refused and you are told the new minimum.
You are also told whether you currently hold the lead, and your own amount.
You are not told the standing bid, how many rivals there are, or who they are. That is not an omission: a bidder who could see the standing bid would know exactly what to add to it, and one who could see a rival’s ceiling would know how far to push before backing off. Withholding it is what makes the auction mean anything.
Some placements carry an extension window. A bid placed in the final minutes pushes the close out, up to a published maximum number of times — so an auction cannot be won by bidding in the last second. The authoritative close always includes any extension already granted, and it is what the countdown on a placement page shows.
If two bids are equal, the earlier one wins. That is the whole rule, and it is published on every decided auction’s result so nobody has to take our word for how a tie went.
When bidding closes the server selects the winner and records the clearing price. A winning bid is the total the advertiser owes: prices are tax inclusive and GST is backed out of the figure rather than added to it, so the number you bid is the number you pay.
If no bid met the reserve, the placement goes unsold and nothing is charged. If an auction is cancelled, the reason is recorded — advertisers may have bid, so a cancellation has to be explained.
Your creative runs for the period you won. Once it is actually delivering, the placement, your brand and the clearing price appear on the public leaderboard.
A placement that has been awarded but has not started delivering does not appear. The reason an advertiser can be named at all is that their advert is already on the page for anybody to see, and that argument does not hold before delivery begins — naming a winner early would publish a forward book the platform never promised.
Two figures are public: the clearing price of every live placement, and how many bids were in contention for it. The first is the marketplace’s own price signal, and by the time a placement is live it can no longer be used to win the auction it came from. The second is the only thing that can be said about a contest without disclosing anybody’s position.
Advertisers are ranked by how many placements they hold, never by what they paid in total. Each price is public, so a determined reader could add them up — but “derivable with effort” and “published as a league table” are different products, and nobody signed up to have their advertising spend ranked by the platform they buy from.
Search results are ordered by text relevance, then lifted by each listing’s own measured click-through rate — capped, and discounted by how much it has been shown. It is a rate, never a volume, precisely because Outshine sells the placements that generate the impressions. Spending more buys more measurement, not a higher position.
Clearing prices for live placements
Once a placement is on the page, what it sold for is public. A marketplace nobody can price cannot be trusted by the people paying for it.
Who holds what, right now
The leaderboard names the advertiser on every live placement — their creative is already on the page for anybody to see.
Nothing about an open auction
While bidding is open, the standing bid, the number of rivals and every bidder’s identity are withheld. A rival who could see the standing bid would know exactly what to add to it.
No forward book
A placement that has been awarded but has not started delivering does not appear. Naming a winner early would publish a schedule the platform never promised.
No advertiser spend league table
Advertisers are ranked by how many placements they hold, never by what they paid in total. Nobody signed up to have their spend ranked by the platform they buy from.
Something on Outshine looks wrong? Raise a complaint and we will answer it.
Create an account, verify your brand, and bid on the placements you want. You pay for the placement you win — nothing to start, and no minimum spend.