Running Auctions on Your Slots
A fixed rate card cannot find the real price of a slot whose value spikes — the window before a token launch, the Saturday before a big sale, a week your channel is trending. Price it too low and someone flips it; too high and it goes unsold. An auction asks the market instead: you put one rate from your rate card up for bidding, advertisers compete, and the highest bid wins.
Auctions live at https://onflowads.com/telegram/dashboard/paid-promotion/auctions (the Auctions pill). As a channel owner the page opens on My auctions, with Auction a slot beside it — that second tab is the seller's flow described below. A channel with a live auction additionally shows a gold "Prime-slot auction" strip on its own marketplace page, with a bid button, the current price and a live countdown, so every buyer who views your channel sees the auction too.
Each auction gets its own OFPA- reference, and when it closes the winning bid becomes an ordinary booking with an OFO- order ID. Those are two different things with two different references — the auction is how the slot was sold, the order is the placement you then have to deliver. See Your Onflow Ads IDs.
Running an auction on your own listing is available from the Plus plan up. If your plan does not include it, the Auctions page shows which plan unlocks hosting. Bidding, by contrast, is open to every plan, including Free — though as a channel owner you cannot bid at all.
What you need before you can host
- A verified, live channel — one still in review cannot host an auction.
- A published rate for the format you want to auction. You are not inventing a number: the Auction a slot tab lists your rate card, one row per channel × priced format, and you pick one. A format with no price on it cannot be auctioned.
- No other open auction on the same format of the same channel — one at a time per format. A format already under the hammer is greyed out in the picker and tells you when it closes.
- The usual Paid Promotions reliability floor — you have to be able to accept the booking your own auction creates.
You cannot bid on your own auction, and neither can a second account linked to yours — bidding your own slot up is refused at the door, not caught afterwards.
The money: what a bid pays you
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is what makes an auction safe to run.
Every price on an auction is the bid itself. Nothing is added on top for the bidder, and one flat fee comes off for you:
| You set | an opening price — e.g. $120. It is the first bid a buyer can place. |
| An advertiser pays | exactly what they bid. There is no buyer markup on an auction, so a $120 bid costs the bidder $120. |
| You receive | the winning bid minus the auction fee: the auction fee is 11%, so a $120 clearing price pays you $106.80. |
The auction fee is deducted automatically at settlement and the balance is credited to your wallet as withdrawable cash, like every Paid Promotions payout. The veteran rate does not apply to auctions, and the fee is pinned onto the auction when you create it — the payout the form showed you is the payout the settled order writes, whatever changes afterwards. The Auction a slot form shows you the payout live as you type, so you never have to work it out.
Because the bidder pays exactly their bid, bidding is ranked on the bid amount: the highest bid is both what the winner pays and what you are paid on, with no rate arithmetic between the two.
Setting up an auction
Pick a rate from the picker, and the form asks for:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Opening bid | Where bidding starts, in your own money. Pre-filled with that format's rate-card price — the natural floor, since the whole point is that the slot is worth more than the card says. |
| Ad goes live | The exact date and time (UTC) the winner's post publishes on your channel. This is what the winner is buying. |
| Bidding closes | The date and time (UTC) after which the highest bid wins. |
| Reserve (optional, private) | A hidden minimum sale price. If no bid reaches it, the slot does not sell and every bidder is refunded. A reserve below the opening price is rejected — it would do nothing — and so is one above the marketplace maximum, the same ceiling as the opening price and the cap. |
| Maximum / instant-buy cap (optional) | The most you are willing to take. Bidding can never go above it, and the first advertiser to pay it ends the auction immediately and takes the slot. Must be above the opening price. |
| Bid increment (optional) | The minimum step between bids. There is a small platform minimum (currently $0.50), used as the default. |
An auction runs from 6 hours to 14 days.
Buyers only ever see a "Reserve met" or "Reserve not met" badge — never the amount. Publishing the number would turn your reserve into the opening price.
Why the go-live has to be well after the close
The form will refuse a go-live that is too close to the closing time, and it tells you the earliest one that works. The gap it insists on is your channel's own lead time (48 hours by default, or whatever you have set) plus room for one anti-snipe extension and the settling pass.
That is not red tape. A last-second bid pushes the clock out; if the auction could then close inside your lead window, the winner's booking would be refused outright — costing you the sale you had already made. So the auction is not allowed to outlive the slot it is selling. Once created, no extension can ever push the close past that hard limit.
How bidding works (seller's view)
The demand side is built so that a winning bid is always real money:
- Every bid is held in escrow the instant it is placed. An advertiser can only bid funds they actually have, so you will never discover after closing that the "winner" cannot pay.
- An outbid bidder is refunded instantly, and only the current leader's money is ever held.
- Every bid carries the bidder's ad post. Advertisers must attach the creative they would run before they can bid, so a win settles straight into a real, postable booking — no chasing the winner for content afterwards.
- Anti-sniping: a bid landing in the closing minutes automatically extends the clock by a few minutes (never past the hard limit above). The winner is whoever valued your slot most, not whoever had the fastest connection at the buzzer.
- On higher plans, bidders can leave an automatic maximum (proxy bidding) — the system bids on their behalf up to their cap. From your side this is invisible; it means more competition stays in the race.
While the auction runs
Watch it from My auctions. Each card is in your money: the current bid, what it would actually pay you after the auction fee, the bid count, the live countdown, the reserve status and the go-live time.
Cancelling
- No bids yet — you can pull the slot at any time. Nothing has been charged to anyone and the rate goes straight back to your card.
- With bids — you can still pull it up until the last 12 hours before the close. Every bidder is refunded in full, automatically, and each one is told the auction was withdrawn and why.
- Inside the last 12 hours — the auction is locked and will settle. This protects the mechanism: an owner who could cancel at the very end, with the clearing price on screen, would have free price discovery, and bidders who worked that out would stop bidding at all. The auction still goes unsold if your reserve is not met, so a lock is not a forced sale.
While an auction is live you also cannot pause or remove that channel, or close (black out) the day its winning ad goes live — each would make the winning bid unbookable. Cancel the auction first (which refunds everyone properly), then pause, remove or close the day.
When the clock runs out
Auctions settle automatically, within minutes of closing:
- No bids, or the reserve was not met — the auction closes unsold. Every hold is released, you keep the inventory, and your notification says which of the two it was.
- Sold — the winning bid becomes an ordinary booking on your channel, automatically, at the clearing price: the winner is charged exactly what they bid, their attached ad post is the creative, and the go-live is the one you set. Your "Your advertising slot sold at auction" notification quotes the amount you will receive, after the auction fee. Accept the booking to lock it in, exactly as you would any other request in your bookings queue.
From that point on everything is a normal placement: the same escrow, the same delivery monitoring by the bot, the same click and view tracking, the same payout schedule and the same dispute rights as any fixed-price booking; only the fee is the auction's own, already deducted at settlement. See Handling bookings and Getting paid.
The auction finds the price; the resulting booking still goes through your normal accept flow, and the usual rules apply — including the reliability cost of letting a request sit unanswered until it auto-declines.
If the slot somehow becomes unbookable between bidding and closing, the winner is refunded in full and the auction closes unsold — nobody's money is ever held against a placement that cannot run.
Someone pays your cap
If you set an instant-buy cap and an advertiser pays it, the auction ends there and then — the deal is closed at your cap and the slot is booked immediately, without waiting for the clock.
Anyone who was still bidding gets their money back in full, automatically, 48 hours after they placed their bid (already elapsed, and it comes back at once). They are told the exact date when it happens, and again when it lands. Nothing is deducted and nothing needs claiming.
"Similar slots cleared N% over rate card"
If you are an owner with a priced, active listing but have never hosted an auction, the Auctions page may show a dismissible banner telling you that recently settled auctions in formats you price cleared a given percentage above their owner's fixed rate card. The figure is the median premium across real recent settlements — never a single lucky outlier — and the banner only appears when the premium is genuinely meaningful. It is information, not a promise: your slot clears at whatever bidders actually pay.
When to auction instead of listing flat
- Spike weeks. Anything that makes your audience temporarily more valuable — a niche event, seasonal demand, a viral run — is exactly what a rate card cannot price.
- Your single best slot. Auction the premium window; keep the rest of your calendar on the fixed rate card. The two coexist on the same listing.
- Price discovery. Where an auction clears well above your opening price, your sold notification tells you by how much — a useful signal for your rate card, too.
Related
- Prices and offers — the rate card an auction opens from.
- Receiving, accepting and declining bookings — the accept flow a winning bid lands in.
- Managing your availability — why a live auction locks pausing, removing and re-verifying.
- The listing manager — the booking lead time an auction's go-live has to clear.