catbid.lolThe genre
Internet Money Games
Pay-to-rank leaderboards like outbid.lol, pixel grids, and shared live toys: the genre where a small payment does something everyone else can watch. Catbid takes both halves of it - the permanent row and the live moment.
What counts as one.
An internet money game is a website where a small payment does something public. Not a purchase, not a subscription, not a feature unlock for you alone: the money moves something that other people are looking at. The spending is the content.
The shape keeps coming back because it inverts what a payment normally is. Usually you pay to get something private. Here you pay to be seen doing it, and the site works only because everybody loads the same state at the same time.
The lineage
Twenty-one years of the same idea.
Three of them, two decades apart, built by people who mostly did not know about each other. The numbers below are dated snapshots, not live figures: they are what was true when they were written down.
Alex Tew put a 1000x1000 grid online on 26 August 2005 and sold the pixels at a dollar each, in blocks of a hundred. The last thousand went to an eBay auction that closed on 11 January 2006 at $38,100, taking the page to $1,037,100 gross.
- Money buys
- Pixels, kept forever
- Everyone sees
- One grid, loaded by everyone
Nolen Royalty shipped it in June 2024 expecting a few hundred visitors. Everyone loaded the same boxes, so checking one meant someone else watched it flip. It absorbed more than 650 million checks and unchecks before he shut it down two weeks later. Players called it a bubble wrap MMO.
- Money buys
- Nothing. It was free
- Everyone sees
- A million checkboxes on one global state
outbid.lol
2026Launched 19 August 2026. Rank is simply cumulative dollars paid, bids open at $5, ties go to the older entry, and taking a lost spot back costs only the difference. Reported figures for 22 August: $132,263 taken across 1,147,442 visitors, top bid $14,013, and more than 190 clones inside the first week.
- Money buys
- A row on a public board
- Everyone sees
- One leaderboard, one ordering
Where this site sits
A board sells a position. A stage sells a moment. This sells both.
On a pay-to-rank board the thing you buy is a row, and it is zero sum: it stays yours until somebody pays more and takes it. That is a good product and a boring picture - a list does not do anything while you look at it.
So the same euro buys two things here. It buys a row on the board - cumulative, permanent, and takeable by anyone willing to spend more than you - and it buys an event on a shared timeline: a specific kitten, dancing once, for whoever has the page open right then. The board is the reason to come back. The stage is the reason to stay.
The full mechanics are on the rules page.
| Pay-to-rank board | Catbid | |
|---|---|---|
| What the money buys | A position in a list | Both: a row on the board and a dance everyone watching sees happen |
| How long it lasts | Until somebody pays more | The dance lasts about a song. The row lasts until somebody outspends it |
| Who has to be there | Nobody. The row sits there | The row waits for everybody. The dance only exists for whoever has the page open |
| What competing looks like | Outspending the row above you | The same, twice: an all-time total that never resets, and a crown that does every night |
| What one euro gets you | Usually less than the opening bid | The minimum, and it is a real one: a real dance and a real row |
The stage is running right now.
Pick an amount, pick a kitten, and everyone with the page open watches it dance for you. Sign it and the same payment puts you on the board. Nukes interrupt the whole room for a few seconds.