Music Business Hub · Hub Economics Spec §2, §4, §7
Auction & Sponsorship Rules
1. Making an offer is always free
Venues post open dates and artists make performance offers at no cost. Sponsorship never buys a gig, a booking or an endorsement. It buys one thing only: a clearly labeled position at the top of an opened list (“Paid to be seen first”).
2. Two surfaces, one sealed second-price auction
- Proposal inbox (`inbox`, 1–10 positions): Up to ten Sponsored cards at the top of a reviewer’s proposal list.
- Claimed page spots (`page_spots`, 1–10 positions): Up to ten sponsorship positions on a claimed page. The page owner approves every placement on character and fit.
- Generalized second price (no platform bid ceiling): You enter your maximum bid (minimum floor $5.00; no platform ceiling — only your own authorized budget cap applies). Bids rank by maximum amount. Each winning bidder pays the next competing maximum from a different confirmed beneficiary, or the $5.00 floor — never more than its own maximum.
- One winner per beneficiary: A confirmed economic beneficiary can win at most one position per auction.
- Tie-break order: Exact ties in maximum bid break by server-recorded acceptance timestamp (`accepted_at` ascending), then by stable bid identifier (`bid_id` ascending).
3. Charged only when the recipient opens the list
No money is captured when you place a bid. The auction settles only at the server-recorded moment the authorized recipient opens the list before the deadline (`recipient_opened_at`). If the recipient never opens the list before the deadline, the auction expires as `expired_unopened` and $0.00 is charged.
After the list is opened, a winning card must be rendered on the recipient’s screen for at least 1,000 milliseconds inside the open-anchored service window. If a captured placement is never delivered within the service window, it is automatically flagged for a full refund or reversal on the original payment rail. Repeat views by the recipient within the window are free.
4. Always labeled, amount never shown, lift evaluation design
Every paid placement shows the plain label “Paid to be seen first” (or “Sponsored”) to the reviewer and public viewers. The dollar amount bid or paid is never shown to the page owner, reviewer or competing bidders. Unlike flat-fee boosts or first-price proposal boosts, TODAY settles by generalized second price only when the recipient opens the list. As a proposed evaluation design for live rollout, periodic randomized placebo control lists can compare uncharged baseline response rates against boosted placements.
5. Ambassador revenue share and material-connection disclosure
Placement-auction revenue belongs to the platform. Where a claimed page was brought to the platform by a confirmed ambassador (and confirmed by the page owner at claim), 50% of net placement-auction revenue (after payment-processor fees and refunds) is shared with that ambassador for the life of the page, with no annual or lifetime cap on ambassador earnings, subject to a 30-day / 1-opened-list activation gate and wash-bidding exclusion (no share on bids placed by the ambassador, the page owner or commonly controlled accounts). Every referred page displays a clear on-page disclosure of the ambassador relationship.