About
Droptick sells one link, once a week, at a price that opens at €10,000 on Monday and falls until someone takes it. Monday morning it resets.
The mechanic is not new
This is a descending auction — the price starts above what anyone will pay and comes down until a buyer stops it. Dutch flower markets have sold this way for over a century: the clock at Aalsmeer runs down, and the first buyer to press the button gets the lot. Google used the same principle for its 2004 share offering.
It survives because it is easy to understand and hard to game. There is no bidding war, no proxy bids, no account, and no way to lose an auction you thought you had won. You either take the price or you do not.
Why you cannot see the price
Every descending auction trades certainty against price. Buy early and you pay more but you are certain. Wait and you pay less, until the moment someone else takes it and you get nothing. That tension is the entire product, and it only works while the cost of waiting is real.
A price on a clock gives that away: whoever can watch the number does not need to know anything — they just wait until it suits them. So the price is not on the page. It is shown to you once, after you have pasted the link you want to put in the slot, and then not again for 30 minutes. It falls in irregular steps, along a curve that is different every week, and the floor is not published. What is public is the opening number, and when it all resets.
Why one link
An earlier version of this site had one slot per category — twenty-nine of them. A descending auction needs at least two buyers who fear each other; spread over twenty-nine slots, they never met, and the board mostly read “unsold”. One link is one place for that fear to live. Categories survive as the label a buyer picks, so the archive can be read by kind.
Why the price paid is public
Next to the link is what it cost. That is not a contradiction of the hidden price: what stays hidden is the running price — the one you could still act on. The price paid belongs to a finished sale on a curve that expires on Monday; publishing it tells you what someone was willing to pay, not what you will.
And it has to be public. An advertisement that hides its price reads as an editorial pick, and this site must never read as one: the link is unmistakably an ad, and there is no ranking anywhere for it to have bought its way into.
What Droptick is not
- Not a review site. Nobody here tested the products listed.
- Not a ranking. There is one position, and it is the one being sold.
- Not an endorsement. The link means someone bought the remainder of a week of attention, not that we recommend them.
- Not a traffic guarantee. What the placement is worth depends on the week, the day you bought, and the creative. The click count next to every past week is the honest measure.
Who runs it
Droptick is built and run by Carsten Sachse, a web developer in Oberursel near Frankfurt. It is a small operation, deliberately: one person, no accounts to manage, no salespeople, and a price that decides itself.
Questions, complaints and take-down notices go to me@carstensachse.de. Full provider details are in the Imprint; how it works in detail is in the Rules.