Why do Outbid clones make $0?

Do Outbid clones really make $0?

Outbid clones do make money, but the typical clone currently makes so little that “$0” is directionally right.

The latest live census from outoutbid.lol has found 474 verified pay-to-rank boards. Revenue can be read from 327 of them. Together they report $332,563, but Outbid.lol alone accounts for roughly $254,331, or 76.5% of the entire amount.

Remove the original and the picture gets ugly fast. The remaining 326 measurable clones have generated $78,233 combined. The median clone has taken just $20.94. There are 111 below $10, 258 below $100 and 33 sitting at exactly $0.

The average clone revenue is around $240, but a few large projects pull that number far above what most builders actually experience. The median is much more useful here.

Reported clone revenue	Measurable clones	Share
Exactly $0	33	10.1%
Under $10	111	34.0%
Under $100	258	79.1%
$100 or more	68	20.9%
Median	$20.94	—

Why is Outbid.lol so much bigger than every clone?

Outbid.lol became huge because the auction landed inside a viral event that kept creating more reasons to watch it.

Jonathan Wilke launched Outbid.lol on August 19. His launch post eventually crossed roughly 1.6 million views. During the initial run, the site itself passed one million visitors in around 48 hours while reported bids raced past $100,000.

The product was almost ridiculously easy to explain: pay more and move higher. Then people started bidding thousands of dollars. Screenshots of the leaderboard became increasingly absurd. Founders argued about whether the bids were genius marketing or a waste of money. Other founders copied it. Wilke shared the numbers publicly. Even a reported $100,000 acquisition offer became another reason to talk about the project.

Each event fed the next one.

Wilke also started with an audience. He already had thousands of founders following his work and an existing business, supastarter, generating around $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That gave Outbid a strong first group of people who understood the joke, had products to promote and could spread it further.

A clone built two days later could reproduce the checkout and leaderboard. Reproducing that exact social moment was much harder.

Did Outbid clones copy the wrong part of the product?

Most Outbid clones copied the easiest part: the bidding mechanic.

The code is straightforward. Someone submits a URL, pays, gets ranked according to the amount and stays there until another person pays more. Hundreds of builders proved how reproducible that system was.

The valuable part sat outside the code. Outbid had hundreds of thousands of people looking at the same leaderboard, including founders willing to spend money to reach other founders.

Outbid101 shows the gap clearly. Its creator rebuilt the basic idea and changed the bidding rule so challengers pay 101% of the existing bid. The opening price was only $1. Its own dashboard later showed 134 visitors, zero listings and $0 paid.

The auction worked technically. Almost nobody had a reason to participate.

That distinction explains a lot of the clone wave. A leaderboard determines who receives attention once attention exists. It creates very little attention by itself.

Is traffic enough to make an Outbid clone work?

Outbid clones need traffic, but the current results show that the wrong 50,000 visitors can be worth less than the right 10,000.

Outbid Story tracked xme.lol at more than 54,000 visitors and roughly $750 in revenue. MostExpensiveLink crossed 100,000 visitors and generated around $1,700. Meanwhile, VibeWar reached only about 8,100 visitors but collected roughly $1,900. Topapp.lol reached around 18,500 visitors and nearly $3,000.

The gap is huge when we turn those figures into rough revenue per visitor. MostExpensiveLink comes out around one or two cents per visitor. VibeWar lands above twenty cents.

Visitor counters are reported differently across these projects, so we should avoid pretending the ratios are precise unit economics. The difference is large enough to survive that noise.

Instabid provides an even cleaner example because its creators published their own post-mortem. They pointed the Outbid mechanic at Instagram accounts and ended up with 41 database rows. Only five became visible paid listings. Thirty-six people reached the reservation stage and disappeared before completing payment.

The creators eventually identified the mismatch themselves. The people watching the Outbid clone wave were mostly founders and indie hackers. Instabid was asking them to pay for Instagram-profile status.

Outbid had founders selling to founders. That buyer-audience overlap was unusually strong.

Project	Reported visitors	Reported revenue	Rough revenue per visitor
Topapp.lol	>18.5K	~$2,960	~$0.16
VibeWar	>8.1K	~$1,891	~$0.23
xme.lol	>54.6K	~$751	~$0.014
MostExpensiveLink	>102K	~$1,666	~$0.016

Did hundreds of Outbid clones kill the scarcity?

The Outbid clone rush diluted the idea almost immediately because hundreds of sites started selling their own version of the same #1 position.

The latest outoutbid.lol census has verified 474 boards. Among projects with public domain-registration timestamps, the first clone domain appeared about 12.7 hours after Outbid went live. Twenty-two appeared within a day and 189 within 48 hours. During the busiest hour, 20 new domains were registered.

That is one every three minutes.

The imitation went far beyond the mechanic. Around three-quarters of the boards use a .lol domain. More than half rank websites or products, just like the original.

A #1 position becomes valuable when people agree that one particular leaderboard matters. Once hundreds of nearly identical boards appear, buyers can become #1 somewhere for almost nothing.

Outbid kept the focal point because everybody was discussing Outbid. In a strange way, the clones helped reinforce it. Builders constantly described new products as “Outbid for X,” which kept the original as the reference everyone understood.

Did launching an Outbid clone early actually help?

Early Outbid clones had a huge advantage even though the entire meaningful timing gap lasted only a few hours.

Outoutbid.lol reconstructed domain-registration times for the first wave and divided the dated clones into four groups. The earliest quarter, registered roughly 12 to 26 hours after Outbid, has generated $9,667. Its median clone made $53.

The last quarter, registered roughly 39 to 49 hours after Outbid, has generated only $1,069. Its median is $12.

So a difference of around one day separated a $53 median from a $12 median.

The second group actually generated more total revenue than the first because a few winners landed there, so the relationship between launch hour and revenue is messy at the individual-project level. The overall decay is still hard to ignore.

By the time hundreds of people had seen their fifth “Outbid for X” screenshot, copying Outbid had stopped being a story. Builders arriving later were selling the same novelty after much of the novelty had already been consumed.

Do stranger Outbid clones make more money than plain copies?

The better-performing Outbid clones tend to change what people are competing for rather than simply opening another startup leaderboard.

The category numbers from outoutbid.lol make the difference surprisingly visible. Websites and products account for 252 boards, more than half the entire census, yet those boards have generated only about $24,251 outside the original.

Ads and billboard-style projects number just 37 and have generated roughly $33,880.

That works out to around $96 per website/product board versus more than $900 per ads-and-billboards board. A few winners distort both averages, but a roughly tenfold gap deserves attention.

Warmap is a good example. Instead of buying another row in a startup directory, companies buy countries on a world map. Someone can take the country by paying 1.5 times the existing amount. Weird Revenue verified roughly $7,394 attributable to the project through its connected Dodo Payments data. All 194 territories were claimed within its first week.

Brand My Mac pushed scarcity even further. Its creator auctioned ten physical sticker positions on the lid of a MacBook Pro. Weird Revenue tracked €7,018 from the project, with 111 bids placed across those ten spaces. A Tom's Hardware article triggered 88 of the bids during an eight-hour stretch.

The strongest variations give people something more visual, limited or funny to own. Another infinitely expanding SaaS ranking gives bidders much less to fight over.

Type of Outbid-style board	Boards	Reported revenue	Revenue per board
Ads & billboards	37	~$33,880	~$916
AI tools & agents	41	~$8,326	~$203
Websites & products	252	~$24,251	~$96
X accounts	62	~$5,029	~$81
Crypto & tokens	27	~$471	~$17
Games & clips	23	~$241	~$10

Did advertisers actually get results from Outbid.lol?

Several Outbid advertisers publicly reported enough leads and traffic to make large bids look economically plausible.

CrowdReply said it spent $12,700 to take the #1 position. According to the testimonial Outbid publishes on its own site, that generated more than 6,550 clicks, around 1,800 signups, more than 50 booked demo calls and roughly $50,000 per month of pipeline.

Tibo, from Outrank, published another unusually detailed result after spending around $12,000. Outrank normally received about 20 trials per day. Over the following three days it recorded 44, 38 and 31 trials. He calculated roughly 53 incremental trials and said the company's usual trial-to-paid conversion rate was around 50%.

Then there is MakerThrive. He reported spending just $42 on an Outbid placement for 1 Million Pixels, receiving around 64,000 visitors and generating $29,000 in one day.

We should treat founder-posted attribution cautiously because these are self-reported marketing results rather than controlled experiments. Even so, buyers suddenly had concrete stories showing that an Outbid position could send real traffic and customers.

That gave later bids an economic reference point. Most clones never reached that stage. A buyer looking at an empty clone has to pay first and hope the audience appears afterward.

Can cheaper bids or better features save an Outbid clone?

Cheaper prices and nicer mechanics have produced little evidence of fixing weak demand for Outbid clones.

Price is already extremely low across the category. Among boards where outoutbid.lol could identify a minimum bid, roughly half start at $1. Another 19% start at $5.

Yet almost four out of five measurable clones remain below $100 in total receipts.

Builders have also experimented with cumulative bidding, anti-sniping rules, categories, backlinks, verified clicks and different ranking formulas. Some of those changes make the product more useful once people are there. None has emerged as a reliable way to create the crowd in the first place.

Outbids.lol is a useful example at the stronger end. It developed dozens of categories, verified bids, metadata and click tracking rather than shipping a bare leaderboard. The project has reached several thousand dollars of board value, which puts it far ahead of the typical clone.

That is a decent outcome. It also shows the scale of the original advantage: considerably more product depth still produces a tiny fraction of Outbid's revenue.

Did AI make Outbid cloning too easy?

AI accelerated the Outbid clone collapse by making a working copy cheap enough to ship during the same viral cycle.

The domain data gives us a rare view of this happening almost in real time. At the busiest point, 20 Outbid-style domains were registered in one hour. Hundreds followed before the idea was even two days old.

Instabid's creators said they built their version in days. Their post-mortem describes the uncomfortable result: 41 database rows and five visible listings.

This is where AI changes the economics for indie hackers. Building a functioning version no longer filters out many competitors when the product is technically simple. Everyone who sees the screenshot can understand much of the specification.

That pushes the scarce stuff elsewhere: an audience people already listen to, a distribution channel competitors cannot instantly inherit, existing customer relationships, proprietary data or an idea interesting enough to keep spreading after the first screenshot.

Outbid exposed that shift unusually clearly because the clones arrived fast enough for us to watch the value disappear.

Can an Outbid-style project borrow someone else's distribution?

Outbid-style projects can work without owning a giant audience beforehand when they attach themselves to a distribution event that already has momentum.

MakerThrive's 1 Million Pixels is probably the cleanest case. The project existed before the Outbid wave. Then MakerThrive bought a $42 placement on Outbid and publicly reported roughly 64,000 visitors and $29,000 generated in one day. Outbid Story now tracks 1 Million Pixels above $37,000.

Brand My Mac found a different channel. Its launch already had social traction, then Tom's Hardware covered the stunt. Weird Revenue's reconstruction found that 88 of its 111 bids arrived within eight hours of the article.

Those examples flip the usual clone strategy around. The auction can monetize attention extremely well after a project finds a source of attention.

Many failed clones started with the auction and expected distribution to emerge from the existence of the auction. The current revenue distribution gives us very little reason to expect that sequence to work.

What would an Outbid clone need to make real money now?

A new Outbid-style project needs a specific crowd with something worth publicly fighting over before we would expect the auction to generate serious money.

The strongest examples these days usually have an obvious competitive object. Warmap has countries. Brand My Mac has ten physical spaces. VibeWar focuses on vibe-coded products in front of the exact founder crowd likely to care about that ranking. Topapp narrows the competition to apps.

The useful test is simple. Who desperately wants the #1 position, who will see that position, and why would losing it annoy the current owner enough to bid again?

If those answers feel weak, polishing the auction probably changes very little.

There is another clue in the category data. Ads and billboard-style boards currently account for only 7.8% of all clones but more reported clone revenue than the 252 website-and-product boards combined. People appear much more willing to pay when the object feels concrete and scarce.

So “Outbid for dentists” or “Outbid for AI tools” needs more than a niche label. The niche has to contain actual competitive behavior and a reachable audience.

Why do Outbid clones make $0?

Outbid clones mostly make pocket change because builders copied the auction after the valuable part of the opportunity had already concentrated around the original.

As seen above, the latest measurable distribution is brutal: 326 readable clones share about $78,233, the median sits at $20.94 and 79% remain below $100. Outbid alone has captured roughly three times as much money as every measurable clone combined.

The evidence points to several things happening at once. Outbid launched first into an existing founder audience. The bidding created increasingly shareable screenshots. Advertisers quickly published stories showing real traffic and leads. Then hundreds of clones arrived within hours, flooding the market with substitute #1 positions.

The few meaningful winners tell us what survived that collapse. Warmap created a game around owning countries. Brand My Mac created ten genuinely scarce physical slots and caught press attention. 1 Million Pixels used Outbid itself as a distribution channel. VibeWar and Topapp found tighter overlaps between the viewers and the people willing to bid.

So the original $250,000-plus result was never a useful revenue benchmark for a cloned leaderboard. The live data now gives us a much better benchmark.

For a normal Outbid clone, it is about $21.