How the ranking works

01The zones

The mountain is cut into seven zones. Each has an altitude, a fixed number of seats and a price to get in.

Base Camp has no ceiling and no limit: $5 always gets you onto the mountain.

02The order

Inside a zone, listings are sorted by total amount paid, highest first.

On a tie, the earlier payment ranks higher. If you and a rival have both paid $250, the one whose first payment landed first is above the other, and stays there until one of you pays more. This is why the board records the moment of your first payment and never resets it when you top up.

03Raising

To pass somebody you need at least $1 more than they have paid.

Payments from the same website address add together. A second payment is a top-up, not a new listing: your total goes up, your position follows it, and nothing you paid before is discarded or reset. One site is always exactly one row on this board.

That also means a raise costs the difference. If you have paid $60 and the seat you want now needs $80, you pay $20.

04A full zone

Every zone above Base Camp has a fixed number of seats. Once they are taken, paying the entry price is no longer enough — you have to clear the lowest bid in that zone by at least $1.

When you do, the listing that was last in that zone drops into the zone below and keeps its amount. It does not lose its money, it does not lose its place in the ordering, and it does not disappear. If that arrival makes the zone below overflow too, the same thing happens there, and so on down. The fall stops at Base Camp, which cannot overflow.

Nobody is ever removed from the mountain for being outbid. The worst that happens is that you end up lower than you started.

05The Summit

The Summit is the exception. It is one seat at $100,000, fixed, bought once. It is not an auction, it cannot be outbid, and it does not expire. Earlier spending elsewhere on the mountain does not count towards it: a fixed price is a price, not a position.

06Going live

Your listing appears when the payment is confirmed by Polar, usually within seconds. The redirect back from checkout is not what publishes it — a signed message from the payment provider is. If you close the tab too early, nothing is lost.

Every listing is reviewed. If we refuse one, the payment is refunded in full within 24 hours. The terms list what we refuse.

07What a payment is made of

Half of every payment is the placement fee: it buys the act of putting you on the mountain, which happens once and cannot be undone. The other half is your standing balance, and that is the part that can come back if you ask us to take the listing down.

Both halves count towards your altitude. A $100 payment is $100 of position — the split decides what is refundable, never what you are worth on the board.

A listing that could sit at the summit for a fortnight and then be refunded in full would have cost every other advertiser their place for nothing. Full details, and the cases where everything does come back, are in the terms.

08What the numbers mean

The click count on each row is our own, deduplicated per visitor per hour, and shown publicly on every listing including the ones above yours. The view and viewer counters in the header count tabs, not people.

Outbound links carry rel=“sponsored nofollow noopener” and pass through a redirect. Buying a position here has no effect on your search ranking anywhere, by design, and anybody claiming otherwise is selling you something else.

09The zones, priced right now

These are entry prices, not current prices: in a zone that is already full, the real cost is one dollar over its lowest bid. Each zone page shows what that is at this moment.

• The Death Zone — from $1,000
• Camp IV · South Col — from $250
• Camp III · Lhotse Face — from $80
• Camp II · Western Cwm — from $25
• Camp I — from $10
• Base Camp — from $5