Managing Your Availability
A live listing is bookable on any open day by default. This page covers the controls over when your channel can be booked and who gets accepted automatically. None of them requires unlisting, changing your prices or sending the listing back through verification.
Before you start
All three controls live on the listing manager. Open it with Manage listing on any channel card on your owner desk. (That button used to open the listing wizard instead, which left this page reachable only through the 📊 Manage channel button on your verification message — the reason so few owners ever found their own scheduling settings.) Full instructions: The listing manager.
Every setting here is per listing, so a channel you watch closely can run same-day auto-accept while another stays on 48 hours and manual approval.
Booking lead time
The Booking lead time panel sets how far ahead an advertiser must book before the placement window may start. Three chips, one tap each, saved instantly on a live listing:
| Chip | What it means |
|---|---|
| 2h · same-day | A placement can start as little as 2 hours after booking |
| 12h | At least half a day's notice |
| 48h | Two full days' notice — where every new listing starts |
Why it matters:
- A lead time of 24 hours or less is what puts your channel in the marketplace's Available today filter. The panel confirms it inline — "your channel shows in the Available today filter" — and the save message reads "Lead time set to Nh — advertisers can book same-day."
Pick the shortest lead you can genuinely honour. A same-day lead you cannot deliver on turns into missed windows, automatic refunds and a 1.00 reliability penalty — see Posting the ad.
An auction is built against the lead time it was opened with: it has to close far enough before go-live that the winning bid can still be booked. Raising the lead afterwards moves that deadline and would leave the winning bid unplaceable — the bidder loses a slot they won on price and you lose a sale you had already made — so it is refused while an auction on that channel is open, and the message names how many are running. Lowering it is always allowed: a booking that satisfies 48 hours satisfies 12. Let the auction close, or lower instead.
A request normally waits 24 hours for your accept or decline. A channel on a 12h or 2h · same-day lead sells slots that start sooner than that, so a request for one waits until go-live — whichever comes first. A same-day booking can reach you with two hours to answer. If you have not accepted or declined it by go-live, it auto-declines, the advertiser is refunded in full, and it counts as a missed booking on your reliability (−0.30), exactly as a request ignored for 24 hours does.
Both places you choose a lead time say so the moment you pick anything under 24 hours — a warning under the chips, a slide-in notice, and the save confirmation — and every short-notice booking card carries a Short notice line with the real time left. Choose a short lead only if you can respond at any time, and keep booking notifications switched on.
The Lead time chips in the listing wizard's Rules step used to write only a cosmetic turnaround label for your rate card: they did not move the booking gate and they did not qualify you for Available today, whatever the hint underneath promised. Owners who chose "Same day" there stayed on 48 hours and had no way of knowing.
They now write the real setting — the same three rungs as this panel — and the rate-card badge is written from the same choice, so the two can no longer disagree. Either control does the job; this one saves instantly on a live listing without going back through the wizard.
Blackout dates
Going away, or facing a week you cannot post in? The Blackout dates panel closes specific days without unlisting: "Close specific days — a holiday, a busy week — without unlisting. Your channel stays ranked and discoverable; buyers just can't book those days."
Step by step
- Open the listing manager and find Blackout dates.
- Pick a From date and a To date. Both must be today or later; a single-day closure is the same date twice.
- Optionally type a Note (optional) for your own reference, up to 200 characters.
- Press Close these dates. The confirmation reads "Those dates are now closed — your channel stays listed."
Existing ranges list above the form, each with its dates and note and a Reopen button that removes it — "Those dates are open for bookings again." With none set the panel reads "No blackout dates — every open day is bookable."
What a blackout does, and does not do
- This gate is real and enforced on the server. A booking whose placement window starts on a closed day is refused at checkout, whatever route the buyer came through.
- Your channel stays live, ranked and discoverable throughout. Your marketplace position, your Standing and your search placement are untouched.
- Blackouts do not touch bookings you have already accepted. Deliver those as agreed.
- Blackouts do not pause spotlights or auctions. If you are away, end or avoid those too.
- A single range may span at most 366 days, and a range entirely in the past is refused with "That range is entirely in the past."
A blackout is the right tool for a break. Removing the channel deletes the listing — your bookings and earnings are kept, but the reviews, the Standing history and the marketplace position attached to that listing are not, and coming back means listing again and passing verification again. A blackout costs you nothing when it ends.
While a slot auction is running on a channel you cannot remove it or send it back for re-verification. The refusal names the reason: removing would destroy bidders' escrowed money outright, and re-verification could change the slot they are bidding on. Cancel the auction first — every bidder is refunded in full — then do what you meant to do. See Running auctions.
Auto-accept
The Auto-accept panel takes qualifying bookings for you, so a request that arrives while you sleep never expires unanswered.
Step by step
- Tick Auto-accept new bookings on this channel.
- Set a floor: Only when they pay at least $ N. Requests below it wait for your manual answer.
- Press Save. The confirmation is explicit about the money: "Auto-accept is on — qualifying bookings are accepted for you, and the good-faith deposit is staked automatically." Turning it off reads "Auto-accept is off — you'll answer each booking yourself."
How it behaves
A background pass runs every few minutes and picks up at most 25 pending bookings at a time whose charge is at or above your floor, on listings with auto-accept enabled. Each one goes through exactly the same accept as the button on the card:
- The booking moves to In progress and the advertiser is notified.
- The refundable good-faith deposit is staked from your wallet where the booking asks for one — 10% of the charge, on bookings of $50.00 or more, capped at $20.00.
- Every delivery obligation follows: the posting window, the monitor, the full promised duration.
When auto-accept cannot act because your withdrawable balance cannot cover the deposit, or because the charge is under your floor, the booking is left in your queue rather than failed. Nothing tells you it was skipped, and the answer clock keeps running, so keep an eye on the queue even with auto-accept on. The one case that does not wait is a gate you cannot clear by hand either: while your reliability is below the 4.0 accept floor, or your account is under review, the request is declined for you at once and refunded in full — with no ghosting penalty.
Every auto-accepted booking is a real obligation with a real posting window and a real reliability penalty attached to missing it. Pair it with a floor you are genuinely happy to honour, with prohibited topics set in the wizard, with blackout dates for the days you are away — and with auto-post on, so the placement does not depend on you being awake.
What the platform actually checks before a booking reaches you
Exactly two of your rules are enforced on the server at checkout:
- The blackout gate. A placement whose window starts on a day you closed is refused.
- The lead-time gate. The placement window must start at least your Booking lead time ahead. In a cart holding several channels, the strictest lead time in the cart applies to all of them.
One more runs earlier, on the buyer's side:
- Prohibited topics. A creative that trips one of your listed topics disables the Continue button in the advertiser's booking composer. It is a literal whole-word match on the caption text and is not re-run at checkout, so treat it as a filter for obvious mismatches rather than a wall. See Listing your channel.
Everything else, your turnaround label included, is presentation. Once a booking clears those gates, either auto-accept takes it or it waits for you, for at most 24 hours — or until the ad's go-live on a short-notice channel — after which it auto-declines, refunds the advertiser in full and costs you 0.30 reliability points. (A request that arrives while you are under review or below the floor is declined for you immediately instead, at no cost to you.)
If something goes wrong
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Lead time must be 2, 12 or 48 hours." | An unsupported value reached the server | Use the three chips |
| "That channel isn't in your pool." | Wrong listing, or wrong account | Check the OFPL- in the address against your desk card |
| "The end date can't be before the start date." | The blackout range runs backwards | Swap the two dates |
| "That range is entirely in the past." | Both dates are before today | Blackouts only close future days |
| "A single blackout can span at most a year." | The range exceeds 366 days | Split it into two ranges |
| "This channel has N live slot auctions running…" | You tried to remove or re-verify a channel with a live auction | Let the auction close, or cancel it first |
| Auto-accept is on but a booking is sitting in New | It did not qualify | Check the charge against your floor, your withdrawable balance against the deposit, and your reliability against the 4.0 floor |
Turn auto-accept on or off for a listing, with an optional minimum order value, is one sentence in the chat — proposed, then run after you say yes. What the assistant can do for you has the full list and the confirmation rule.
Related
- The listing manager — where all three controls live, and how to reach it.
- Receiving, accepting and declining bookings — what happens once a request clears every gate.
- Prices and offers — dynamic pricing, spotlights and the pin extra.
- Posting the ad — what accepting actually commits you to.