Advertising
Buy attention. Labelled, above the table, and out of the ranking.
Teams reach the index knowing their sport, their weekend and roughly their budget, and then they compare. A placement puts your event in front of exactly those teams — filtered to your sport, your region, your age brackets — without touching the comparison they came to make. That constraint is what makes the attention worth buying: an audience that trusts the table is a better audience than one that suspects it.
Per tournament
$149
one event, every channel below
Flat, and the whole price. No placement sizes, no durations and no channel tiers, so the figure quoted on the submission form is the figure on the invoice.
All of it, for the one fee, because a band above the index and a slot in the email that goes to the same teams are one placement doing one job. Buying them separately would mean quoting six prices for one weekend, and an organizer choosing between them would be guessing at our traffic rather than at their own event.
Every one of those carries the Sponsored label. The index band and the homepage feature draw the full listing — grade, attendee rating, cost per guaranteed game, refund terms — because a placement that hides the figures would be advertising a page a team then bounces off.
A sponsored event is lifted out of the ranked results into its own band with its own heading. Nothing in the ranking below moves by a single row, so the order of the table is still what the grade made it. The alternative — pinning paid rows to the top of a sort — would be worst under “cost per guaranteed game”, where a paid row above a cheaper one destroys the meaning of the column.
Filters run before placements. Filter to soccer in Ontario under $900 and a sponsored hockey event in Prague is simply absent — not demoted, absent. Money buys the band, not the result set.
The grader never reads the commercial columns, so a sponsored listing carries exactly the GameVoyaGrade its published facts earn, and its reviews are the reviews teams filed. A placement that lifted the figure would make the figure worthless, which would make the placement worthless with it.
Every placement carries the word Sponsored and the GameVoya Spotlight marker — on the band header, on the row itself so it still declares what it is when screenshotted out of context, and in the email or homepage feature. There is no unlabelled inventory and there is no version of this product without the label.
Organizers can pay for tools, exposure, verification and insight. They cannot pay for a grade. Selling labelled placement alongside our own ratings is the arrangement the travel-comparison sites run on, and it works for the same reason: the placement is disclosed and the ranking is left alone.
Tripadvisor sells sponsored placements alongside its own ratingsA placement is chosen per tournament, on the submission form, as a checkbox beside the listing itself. Ticking it records your intent and the price you were quoted; it does not start the placement. The placement starts when the invoice clears and the listing has cleared moderation, which are two separate gates on purpose — we do not want a paid band above the table pointing at an event a researcher has not yet read against your own event page.
No card is taken on the form. The quoted figure is stored with the submission rather than looked up later, so a price change next season cannot rewrite what you already agreed to.
