About the board

In 2005 a student sold a million pixels on a single web page for a dollar each and made a million dollars. It worked because the space was finite, because it was public, and because every buyer could see exactly what everyone else had got for their money.

Times Square runs on the same logic in physical space. Nobody there pays a flat rate for “a sign”. You pay for square metres, everyone can see how many you took, and the biggest boards belong to whoever wanted them most.

BidWall is that mechanic: one screen, 502 spots, and the amounts printed on the tiles.

A fixed-price banner is a strange thing to sell. Every advertiser pays the same and gets the same box, so the only thing deciding who appears is who filled in the form first. The price is a guess made by the seller, and the placement itself tells a reader nothing.

Pricing by area fixes both ends of that. The market sets the price rather than me — the cost of the largest tile is whatever the most motivated company decided it was worth, and it goes up only when someone actually pays it.

More interestingly, the ad unit becomes informative. A big tile means a company that committed real money to being seen, which is a genuine signal. A banner only ever meant a company that clicked buy. Reading the board is reading a ranked list of conviction, denominated in dollars, at a glance.

Most advertising is rented. You pay, it runs, it stops, you pay again. That is fine for a campaign and terrible for a landmark.

Here the spot is sold once. No subscription, no expiry, no renewal email, nothing to cancel. A company that paid in the first week is still on the board in year three without having done anything.

The catch is the interesting part: permanent is not the same as fixed. Your total stays; your rank does not. Payments stack, so anyone can pass you by paying more, and when they do your rectangle shrinks and theirs grows. The board is a live scoreboard of who wanted it most, and it never finishes.

It is exactly 502 spots. Once more companies are listed than it can hold, the last and smallest spot stops being a company and becomes a link to everyone the board cannot draw. So getting on means beating the last company still drawn, and staying on means not being that company.

There is no sign-up, no password, no dashboard, and no welcome email. You type a name, a website, a tagline, a logo, and you pay. Stripe handles the card. You are on the board.

To add to your total later you open your own profile page and pay again. The site recognises your domain and adds the amount to your existing listing rather than creating a second tile.

An account would be a login screen guarding a text field and a Pay button, so there isn’t one. The side effect is that there is no credential to leak, no session to hijack, and no profile of you for anyone to build.

The board is packed in whole grid cells — 3,600 of them, arranged 80×45 on a widescreen monitor, 60×60 on a tablet and 45×80 on a phone. Every company is a square. Area follows what you paid; the leftover cells stay empty. The cell budget is the same everywhere, so your share of the screen is identical on a laptop and a phone. Rank 1 sits in the middle and everyone else packs around it.

Area is not proportional to raw dollars. If it were, one company paying a hundred times the average would swallow almost the entire screen and everyone else would be an unreadable sliver. So every total is raised to the power of 0.65 before areas are worked out. That preserves the ordering exactly — more money is always a bigger tile, with no exceptions — while compressing the extremes:

Pay 10× more

≈ 4.5× the area

Pay 100× more

≈ 20× the area

There is also a floor and a ceiling, both relative to how many companies are drawn. About 30% of the board is split equally so every seat exists; the rest is the prize for paying more. No tile may fall below the size of a readable mark, and #1 cannot take more than about 42% on a short board or about 17% on a full one. A single huge bid cannot buy the whole screen, and a $1 company still has a square when a hundred others are here.

The layout itself is concentric. Rank one gets a square in the middle of the screen, and everyone else packs around it — so reading outward from the centre is reading down the leaderboard. Squares cannot fill a rectangle, so leftover cells stay empty.

All of it is rendered on the server as static CSS. The board needs no JavaScript to lay itself out and does not shift after it loads.

• Any amount from $1 — up to $500,000 in a single payment. Whole dollars, one time, via Stripe.
• Rank is total paid — highest total is rank one and sits in the centre. Ties favour whoever paid first.
• Top-ups stack — a second payment adds to your total; it never creates a second tile.
• One company, one tile — enforced on your domain, so nobody can buy the board twice over.
• Nothing expires — you can only be out-ranked, never invoiced again.

This is a one-person operation. I build it, I run it, and I read the email — I am @brmdjd on X. The board is the product, the strip along the bottom is the only navigation, and the code does what these pages say it does — the terms and the privacy policy are written to be read rather than clicked past. If you want a spot, the button is on the board. For anything else there is one email address.