Slot auction

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Thirty-one days, with an auction running inside them

Running the auction after the term expires sounds natural and is an expensive mistake: for the whole auction the slot sits empty and earns nothing. Look at how this is actually done and it stops being a choice at all — airport slots are reallocated two months before the season, domain auctions finish before the previous owner's redemption period is up, clubs agree a replacement shirt sponsor months ahead and announce it on changeover day. No system reallocates occupied inventory by going dark first.

Every day number below is computed from the data rather than written into the page.

The seven days between the close and the end of the term are for payment and handover. Throughout them the slot is still the outgoing holder's: their logo is on screen and their term is still running. That is why the buffer costs nobody anything — and it holds even in the worst case: twenty-four hours of anti-snipe extension, seventy-two hours to pay, and forty-eight more for the second bidder if the winner defaults. A hundred and forty-four hours against a buffer of a hundred and sixty-eight.

There is no renewal privilege. A brand whose term ends enters the same auction as everyone else on the same terms. That has a cost, and it is written out below, after the rules.

Eleven slots

Every slot has the same floor. A floor is not a valuation — it is the price below which a slot is not sold at all. The slots are worth very different amounts: the largest covers seventy-one times the area of the smallest.

The single price on each card is what it costs to take that slot. Beside it is what the slot actually is on a reference phone, and which cohort it falls into.

The eleven slots do not all open at once

If they all sold on the same day they would all reopen on the same day forever, and that breaks four separate things: eleven substitutable lots would split a pool of a few buyers eleven ways; eleven approvals and eleven payments would land in the same seventy-two hours; the storefront would be alive a few days a month and dead the rest; and the whole inventory would be priced by however much demand happened to exist in one short stretch.

The fix is three cohorts, staggered by lengthening the first term — never by shortening one. Everyone gets the full thirty-one days advertised and some get more, so no pro-rating and no refund arithmetic ever arises. From the second cycle every slot runs a clean thirty-one days and the cohorts sit permanently ten days apart.

The cohorts are mixed by size, with the three largest orbits spread one to each. A cohort of nothing but small planets draws no attention, and putting two near-identical slots in the same window means your own inventory competes with itself. Cohort C's first buyer gets fifty-one days for the same money — printed here rather than quietly allocated.

Not the exception, the normal case

For most slots in the first year, most cycles will draw no bid at all. A mechanism that treats that as an error will fail continuously. Out-of-home advertising, with professional sales teams, runs 30-40% vacancy as ordinary business; nothing here will do better.

When the auction closes empty the slot converts to a standing price with no deadline, first come. But that price is not the opening price — it is the opening plus one raise.

Two more rules. The price does not decay while a slot sits vacant — the floor is sticky. A vacant price that drops on a schedule is a descending auction with an infinite clock and a patient buyer simply waits for the bottom. And the standing price cannot be bought until the term boundary has passed: available on day twenty-five, it would start a new term on day twenty-nine and displace a paying holder with two days left — exactly the failure the fixed term was invented to remove, walking back in through the side door.

Approval happens before bidding, not after winning

No artwork reaches the game unlooked-at, but the review is what earns you the right to bid rather than something that follows a win. An advertiser is approved once: one square source logo and a line saying what is being advertised. The game scales that logo down to each slot itself, so no per-slot artwork is ever commissioned.

Why this order: put the review after the close and the arithmetic fails. Payment needs seventy-two hours and review forty-eight, and one rejection — the sponsor resubmits, it is reviewed again — overruns the end of the term. A review that cannot reject is not a review, so the thing that has to move is the order, not the review. With the auction window down to three days this is no longer even a choice.

The side benefit is not small: reviewing happens when there is time for it rather than against a closing clock, and the case where someone wins and then submits something unusable disappears entirely.

If you would rather not deal with an auction

Following a monthly auction does not suit most companies. A slot can be taken directly instead: which slot, for how long, for how much — you name all three. If we agree, the slot does not go to auction at all for that span.

There is no published rate card, and that is deliberate. Publishing one would mean pricing an audience the game does not have yet; and no single figure can cover eleven slots that differ seventy-one-fold in area. Talking about each deal separately is more honest than printing a price for something we cannot value.

The one reference point you have is not hidden either: the board above shows what each slot costs right now, and the bid history shows what it has gone for. A direct deal is priced up from there, because it takes the slot off the market.

One detail: the span you name is rounded up to the term boundary, never down. Ask for a hundred days and you get a hundred and twenty-four, the difference free. That is not generosity but the calendar: the cohorts are built on thirty-one-day terms, and an arbitrary rental length would break that grid permanently. Rounding up keeps the grid without short-changing anyone — the same choice already made for the launch cohorts.

Buying it permanently

A slot can also be taken permanently, and again you name the number. We are not writing a minimum, because we are in no position to.

What permanent means is written down: for as long as this game is published by this studio. Nothing longer can honestly be promised, and a promise that cannot be kept is worse than none.

Any figure discussed is a net amount, exclusive of VAT and withholding. Buyers resident in Türkiye apply 15% income-tax withholding under Presidential Decree 476, and partial VAT withholding above a threshold — both paid to the tax office by the buyer on the seller's behalf, so the same figure does not mean the same thing for two buyers. Buyers abroad carry no Turkish withholding. None of this is operating yet; no invoice can be issued before the tax registration exists.

business@lacunate.com Open in Gmail (opens in a new tab) — which slot, how many days and how much is enough to start.

The numbers

This table and the calendar above it are generated from auction.json — a number in a table cannot drift from the number in the file.

What the same rule for everyone actually does

A brand whose term ends gets no privilege; it enters the same auction as everyone else, and that auction opens at half the last price paid. With two interested parties this is entirely harmless — they raise each other to their real valuations.

With one, something else happens, and not saying so would be keeping something from you. In an ascending auction a lone bidder clears at the opening price, because nothing forces them higher. So the sequence runs 12 → 6 → 5 and settles on the floor in three terms. Those numbers describe our discount rule, not what the buyer would have paid.

Which means: in the long run the price of a slot is the floor. That is why the floor is five dollars rather than three. Whether one floor can carry slots that differ seventy-one-fold is an open question, and it is below.

What, when, for how much

Without seeing what a slot has gone for, there is no way to know what to bid. Amounts and dates are public, the bidder's name is not — showing a competitor what a company paid is not part of what is being sold.

Applying for approval is not the same as being accepted

The artwork is reviewed by a person and can be refused. There is no obligation to give a reason, but in practice it will be one of these.

What has to be finished first

Listing these is the reason the auction does not run; it is not an apology for it.

• No rate card also means nothing to ask againstDropping the published price removed the problem of two figures on the same inventory. What went with it is the number a buyer could hold themselves up against, and a buyer who cannot judge the fit without writing usually does not write. The board is itself a price — but a weak anchor until the auction has run and the history holds real numbers.
• A permanent sale has no floorLetting the buyer name the number is the right call for something whose value we do not know. But a permanent sale is the only irreversible act in this design, and it would be made at the moment of least information: unreleased game, no players, empty auction history. The boundary is written down — for as long as this game is published by this studio — but there is still no legal entity to be a party to such a contract.
• One floor across slots that differ seventy-one-foldBecause the long-run price of a slot is the floor, this means the large orbits are permanently underpriced. Screen share is already measured; setting one rate per percentage point is one guess, not eleven.
• What happens when a sponsored planet is tappedUndecided, and it is what actually sets every price on this page. A purely decorative logo is worth what a novelty is worth. A tappable, counted logo is a channel that grows with the player count. The difference between them is an order of magnitude.
• Tax registration — this is what comes nextThe route is now known: sole proprietorship, invoice, bank transfer. It is not set up. A payment from a buyer resident in Türkiye carries 15% income-tax withholding under Presidential Decree 476, which the buyer pays to the tax office on the seller's behalf; a payment from abroad carries no Turkish withholding at all. Registering is the one step that cannot be undone, so it does not happen until there is a real buyer.
• Disclosure inside the gameTurkish law wants a paid brand to be identifiable as advertising where it is shown. The game does not do that yet.
• The theme's age gateSponsored orbits are for adults. The theme that carries them is currently open to everyone, including under-thirteens.
• Thirty-one days or twenty-eightThe advertising industry's unit is four weeks: out-of-home rate cards are based on four-week delivery and the in-game measurement standard counts thirteen periods a year. Twenty-eight gives exactly thirteen cycles with every close on the same weekday; thirty-one shifts by three days each cycle. The change is cheap because the whole calendar derives from that one number.

If you will want a slot, an email sent now is worth more than one sent later: business@lacunate.com. Neither side is committing to anything.

Mechanism and state: auction.json · slot measurements: sponsor-data.json · what a slot is: Advertising