How the daily price works, how display time is shared between advertisers, and what happens when every slot on a space is taken.
There is one number in this product: what one advertiser pays for one day in your slot. Everything below follows from that — how several advertisers share a slot, what happens when it is full, and why none of it involves impressions or clicks.
Rotation and billing are deliberately separate ideas. Ads rotate every 30 seconds when more than one is running, but a rotation is never a unit of billing. You are selling a period of display, not a quantity of views.
Every ad space has a single price: what one advertiser pays for a day in the slot. There's no per-impression or per-click math — you set a daily rate, and that's what shows on the advertiser sign-up page. That's the main thing that differs from online advertising platforms generally, where the rate is an auction outcome you read about afterwards.
Ads still rotate every 30 seconds when more than one is sharing a slot, but that's purely how the slot is displayed — it's never a separate unit of billing.
Pricing per day rather than per impression is what makes it possible to monetise your website without scale: you're selling a period of display to a business that wants to reach your readers, so the number that matters is what a day is worth to them, not how many thousands you can produce.
Once every slot on a space is taken, new advertisers don't just see "come back later" — they can place a bid to join a queue for the next slot that opens.
You can see who's waiting and the current top bid from your space's manage page.
Both of those rules are deliberate departures from how online advertising platforms usually run an auction, where the highest bidder takes the impression and whoever was there before simply stops appearing.
When more than one ad is live on the same space, display time isn't divided evenly between them — it's proportional to what each one pays per day.
Example: Bob's ad runs at $1/day and Sarah's at $9/day. Between them that's $10/day, so Sarah's ad shows roughly 90% of the time and Bob's about 10% — in 30-second turns, spread evenly across the rotation rather than clumped together (so it looks more like Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Bob, Sarah, Sarah... repeating, not nine Sarah slots in a row followed by one Bob slot).
This is why nobody is ever guaranteed 100% of the display time just by being live — if someone else joins at a higher rate, the split shifts to reflect it. Advertisers see this explained, plus a live estimate based on who's currently sharing the space, before they submit or bid.
This only matters when a space allows more than one advertiser. With max advertisers set to 1, whoever's live gets the whole slot.
Can I change the price with advertisers running? Yes. The new price applies to new purchases. Running advertisers keep the rate they agreed until they change it themselves — except where you raise the minimum above what they currently pay, in which case they are paused and told why, and can resume by matching the new rate.
Does a queued bid cost anything? No. Nothing is charged until a bid is actually promoted into a real slot, and a higher bid never displaces a running advertiser — it wins the next slot to free up.
What if nobody buys? Nothing is owed. An unsold space costs nothing, and the slot shows a small invitation to advertise rather than an empty box.
More on choosing the number in how to price ad space on a small website, or run it through the earnings calculator.