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 placement up for bidding, advertisers compete, and the highest bid wins.
Auctions live on the shared Auctions page at https://onflowads.com/telegram/dashboard/paid-promotion/auctions. Advertisers bid there; as an owner, that is also where hosting starts — owners whose plan includes auction hosting see an "Auction one of your slots" card. 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.
Running an auction on your own listing is a paid feature — the plan comparison lists "Run auctions on your listings" 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.
What you need before you can host
- A verified, live listing — a channel still in review cannot host an auction.
- The format you are auctioning must be priced on that channel's rate card (you are auctioning one of your existing placement formats, for example a pinned 1/24 post).
- No other open auction on the same format of the same channel — one at a time per format.
You cannot bid on your own auction, and self-dealing earns nothing anyway.
Setting up an auction
When you create an auction, you decide:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Format | Which placement format on your rate card is being auctioned. |
| Opening price | Where bidding starts. Required. |
| Reserve (optional) | A hidden minimum sale price. If no bid reaches it, the slot simply does not sell and every bidder is refunded. A reserve below the opening price is rejected — it would do nothing. |
| Bid increment | The minimum step between bids. There is a small platform minimum (currently $0.50), used as the default if you do not set one. |
| How long it runs | From 6 hours up to 14 days. |
| The posting window | The date range the winner is actually buying — when their ad will run on your channel. It can be at most 30 days wide, and it must start at least 48 hours after the auction closes, so the winning ad can genuinely be scheduled. |
Buyers only ever see a "Reserve met" or "Reserve not met" badge — never the amount. Publishing the number would just turn your reserve into the opening price.
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 — the Auctions page states the rule to every bidder. 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 simply means more competition stays in the race.
While the auction runs
Watch it from the Auctions page — the card shows the current bid, the bid count, the live countdown, and the reserve status. When someone is outbid they are notified immediately, which tends to bring them back with a higher bid.
Cancelling: you can cancel an open auction at any time before it closes. Every live bid is refunded in full, automatically, and the confirmation tells you how many bidders were refunded. The slot stays yours.
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 you get a notification ("Your auction closed without a sale") saying whether the cause was no bids or an unmet reserve.
- Sold — the winning bid becomes an ordinary booking on your channel, automatically, at the winning price: the winner is charged exactly their bid, their attached ad post is used as the creative, and the posting window is the one you set when creating the auction. You get a "Your auction sold" notification with the clearing price — 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, the same payout schedule, the same dispute rights, and the same platform commission as any fixed-price booking. 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 (for example the listing went inactive), the winner is refunded in full and the auction closes unsold — nobody's money is ever held against a placement that cannot run.
"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 on the platform — 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.
Next: Refer and earn — earn a share of the platform fee on bookings by people you brought in.