The 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. Dancing Kittens sells the moment instead of the rank.
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.
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. This sells a moment.
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. Dancing Kittens has no rank to take. You buy an event on a shared timeline - a specific cat, a specific song - and it happens once, for whoever has the page open. The queue on the stage is the receipt.
| Pay-to-rank board | Dancing Kittens | |
|---|---|---|
| What the money buys | A position in a list | An event on a shared timeline |
| How long it lasts | Until somebody pays more | About as long as the song |
| Who has to be there | Nobody. The row sits there | Whoever has the page open |
| What competing looks like | Outspending the row above you | Nothing. There is no rank to take |
The stage is running right now.
Pick a kitten, pick a song, and everyone with the page open hears it dance. Nukes interrupt the whole room for a few seconds.
Open the stage