A French "pay-to-rank" leaderboard: the board shows €27k, real income is $7.7K, and the backlink business on the side is real
What it is A French startup's "pay to rank" leaderboard: whoever has paid the most cumulatively sits at #1, and every listing carries an outbound link.
Why it took off outbid.lol trended on X, and the French version launched the next day to catch the first wave of copycat money. Once the hype faded, French SEO and link-trading firms kept buying permanent backlinks on it.
CHow you could follow Not recommended as a copy. SEO operators who already have a network of sites and link clients could package backlink slots as a public ranking inside their own language and industry circles, or wait for the next viral mechanic and launch a local version within 24 hours.
Global rank 91k · 90 days ago, top 1M+
premierdelaclasse.lol launched the day after outbid.lol blew up, as a French clone. Its global rank climbed from 90M to 1k in 90 days. Looking closer, most of the money came in the first week, and three quarters of the board's figure was posted by the founder himself. The ranking itself rests on a few hundred of his sites linking to each other. People still pay after the hype, because what it sells is backlinks, not positions. The business is real but small, and it is hard to copy.
October 31 morning, a new site every second
Oct 31 2026, early morning 07:25 (UTC): premierdelaclasse.lol's listings started adding one new entry every second, sorted alphabetically. Every entry was a French shopping-guide site with a name like baintextilia.com or airfryaccess.com, each priced at exactly €52. Over the run, 297 listings went up, totaling €15,444. That day, the site took in $1.1 on Stripe.
These sites can be found in several "French e-commerce directories" the founder, Julien Jimenez, runs himself (idealx.org, floobits.com, netmeg.net). 11-06 When you open the homepage, three of the top ten are these directory sites: idealx.org €500, floobits.com €500, netmeg.net €310.
So when you look at this site, separate the two numbers. The board's stats show a cumulative €27,687 and 831 listings (public API, 11-06). Stripe-verified real revenue is $7,718 (TrustMRR, early November). The gap, roughly €21k, was posted by the founder himself (inferred, since listing timestamps don't match Stripe payments).
What it is
The homepage title is "Premier de la Classe, le classement acheté des startups françaises", meaning "Top of the class: a bought ranking of French startups." There are no judges and no algorithm: position depends only on how much you have paid cumulatively, starting at €0.30 (later changed to €1), with each raise of €0.30. Each listing has a name, a one-line description, a clickable external link, and public click counts. There is also a daily board that resets each day, and a paid "detail page".
11-06's top spot went to the French link-trading platform Linkavista, at €910.30, paid for 4 times, with links carrying the founder's own referral code ref=Julien2976. Second place was Hitworkers at €600, third SEO House at €530.
The founder's main business is online reputation management and cleaning up Google search results. He also holds a few hundred exact-match-domain e-commerce review affiliate sites. He didn't come from product; he comes from SEO.
Why this site, and why that day
On 2026 August 19, Jonathan Wilke launched outbid.lol: an English leaderboard where whoever paid the most ranked first. From 8-21 to 8-24 it hit X trending three times, took nearly $100k in two days, and one person paid $16k for the top spot.
premierdelaclasse launched on 8-24, with its first listing at 07:42 (UTC). That same day, X's trending summary "Outbid.lol Leaderboard Bids Soar Past $17,000 in Days" listed it among the clones, saying "$1.7K (1.8K visitors)". Over 8-24 and 8-25 there were 55 listings, €3.5K. Stripe income for all of August was $4,174, 54% of its total revenue to date.
它赢在快，也赢在「法语 + 法国初创」这个具体的人群：按欧元计价、起价低、有分类，文案还专门讽刺法国本土那些初创榜（创始人 8-27 的 LinkedIn 帖子开头是「所有初创榜都在骗你一点」）。专门统计这股浪潮的 outbid.fyi 评价它是「做得比较完整的地区榜之一」。
Still, don't treat this as a big business. That LinkedIn post got 1 likes and 4 comments. There isn't a single X post mentioning it in the past 90 days. French media never covered it. No Google Ads spend was found either.
After the hype: who still pays
outbid.fyi tracked 354 such clone sites in total, $508k cumulatively, and most get no traffic now. The French e-commerce version, ecombid.io, which launched the same day, made $0 in the last 30 days. The English Template League has $87.7k cumulatively and $0 now.
premierdelaclasse still had $2,181 in October, mostly from 10-07 to 10-16 (10-12 $766, 10-14 $696). The board shows who's paying: Linkavista, SEO House, Linksgarden, ChatSEO, almost all link-building and SEO tool companies, plus a few small French SaaS products like the "French Skool" Klubizz and the link-in-bio tool ULTIME.Bio.
These buyers aren't buying exposure. They're buying a permanent, non-nofollow backlink on a site with an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 74, plus the "French startup" label. The more weight the board has, the more the backlinks sell for, and that weight was built by the founder using his own site network: several directory sites link to it, his blog carries its banner in every article, and hundreds of affiliate sites are on the board, effectively linking to each other.
But the business is also shrinking. Since 10-22, Stripe has shown almost no new income; the last 7 days came to $0 (TrustMRR). The new listings from 11-04, Hitworkers at €600 and Linkavista at €200, don't appear in Stripe payments. Whether they were paid through another channel or placed by insiders can't be determined.
What got the ranking to 90k, and why
Global traffic rank (Tranco): 9-03 at 534k, 9-17 to 162k, 10-01 to 105k, its best 10-31 at 87,142, then 11-05 slipped back to 91,041.
Comparing it with the original shows the problem. outbid.lol had over a million visitors in August, with its best rank only in the hundreds of thousands, and it has now dropped out of the top 1M. premierdelaclasse's visitor count is clearly much lower, yet its rank is far higher. In Chrome's real-user data, it has only reached the top 500k tier in France and is absent from the global top 1M. Tranco counts how many distinct sites link to you, and that is exactly what the founder's site network is best at manufacturing. So the rank is mostly built from backlinks and doesn't reflect that many real people are visiting (inferred; the breakdown of each component isn't visible).
If you see it climbing a ranking, don't read that as user growth.
Three things to take away
Within 24 hours of a viral mechanic appearing, build a version in the local language for a specific audience. The money it took in August came from being a day ahead of others and closer to the French startup crowd than the English version. But a window like this lasts a week or two at most.
Selling "paid rankings" to people who need backlinks lasts longer than selling "exposure". Other clone sites' income went to zero once the hype faded. This one kept selling for two more months because its buyers shifted from spectators to SEO firms with budgets.
A site network can make numbers look good, and also make them misleading. Both the board's figures and the traffic rank were inflated, and third-party stats sites repost them, so it looks like "someone is spending big here". The attractive numbers outsiders see may well come from exactly this.
If it were you
One-line verdict: Don't copy it. The outbid wave has passed, and most of the 354 clone sites get no traffic. This one still sells because of the founder's backlink authority built from hundreds of sites and his network in French SEO circles, and you don't have either.
Who it suits: People already doing SEO, with a set of authoritative sites and a circle of backlink buyers. For you, it's a way to package backlink slots as a "public ranking". You could try it in your own language and circles, for example the German or Italian SaaS scene, or a particular vertical.
Who it doesn't suit: Indie devs hoping to make money off the "pay to be first" gag itself. The gag is stale, and a board without backlink authority is worth $0 once the hype fades.
How to build it: First find buyers willing to pay for backlinks (link platforms, SEO tools, local SaaS), then build the board. Keep the entry price low and let early listers spread it themselves. The board pages need to be indexable by search engines, with no nofollow on links, since that's what buyers actually want.
How to get users: Link to it from your existing sites and blog, post contrarian takes like "every ranking is lying to you" in the target circle's LinkedIn and communities, and get it listed on stats sites like outbid.fyi and TrustMRR.
When to move: The "paid ranking" gag itself has no window left. To do this, wait for the next viral mechanic and ship a local version within 24 hours.
What would prove us wrong: If premierdelaclasse 11 and December's Stripe revenue climb back above $2,000 a month, and the new buyers aren't just people from the SEO circle, that means paid backlink directories have their own demand in smaller-language markets, and it's worth a second look.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one outbid.lol Web 2026-08-19 X trending 3 days straight, roughly $150K+; Tranco 10-29 dropped out of the top 1M The original, in English, for the global indie crowd. premierdelaclasse is the French localized version, priced an order of magnitude lower. outbid.green / Template League / warmap.lol Web 2026-08 TrustMRR lifetime $17.4K / $87.7K / $10.2K; last 30 days $3.3K / $0 / $527 Generic English charts or map gimmicks, with no local audience and no backlink positioning ecombid.io Web 2026-08-24 TrustMRR lifetime $1,446, last 30 days $0 Also French, but e-commerce. With no SEO site network behind it to carry the authority, it's dead. idealx.org Web 2026-10 302 sites, 28 clicks The founder's own sister leaderboard, mainly used to host his e-commerce affiliate sites Linkavista / Linksgarden / SEO House and other netlinking platforms Web Years ago France's mature market for buying backlinks This is where buyer budgets actually go. premierdelaclasse works as a one-time, permanent, publicly ranked backlink slot, and these platforms end up buying placements on it. LinkedIn Top Startups / Maddyness and other startup rankings Other Once a year Authoritative media rankings premierdelaclasse's copy mocks them directly: its judges and algorithms are opaque - Where users come from
- Verified Riding outbid.lol's X trend: 8-24 was named a clone by Grok's trending summary on launch day ($1.7K, 1.8K visitors). From 8-24 to 8-25 it had 55 listings, €3.5K.
- Verified The founder's own sites link to each other and send traffic: floobits.com, netmeg.net and idealx.org all list it; jimenezjulien.com puts a dofollow banner on every blog post; DR 74
- Verified Founder's LinkedIn: 8-27 post, 1 likes, 4 comments
- Verified Directories and SEO content: outbid.fyi, TrustMRR, leswizards.com, Pinterest, and rewritten corporate360.fr articles
- Verified Referral ties inside the SEO crowd: the top slot, Linkavista, links with the founder's referral code ref=Julien2976. Most buyers are netlinking firms and SEO tools.
- Inferred Paid ads: googleads library shows no_ads; nothing found
premierdelaclasse.lol: why it ranked
Research date 2026-11-07. Sources: this site's public /api/board endpoint (scraped 2026-11-07), TrustMRR (indie library and web pages), the traffic library (Tranco / CrUX), x-radar, and Jina search and page scrapes.
One line
On the day after outbid.lol trended on X (2026-08-24), French SEO and online-reputation consultant Julien Jimenez launched a French clone called "Premier de la Classe, le classement acheté des startups françaises" (the bought ranking of French startups). Verified Stripe revenue is only $7.7K, mostly from the first week. It kept selling because it's really selling a DR 74 dofollow backlink, and the buyers are French netlinking and SEO firms. The €27.7K shown on the board is about three-quarters the founder himself bulk-listing through his 300 affiliate sites, not revenue. Tranco climbed to 90k mostly because his own sites link to each other, not because that many people visit.
1. What it is
- Homepage headline: "Premier de la Classe, le classement acheté des startups françaises". There are no judges and no algorithm. Rank depends only on how much you've paid in total, starting at €0.30 (later raised to €1), with each bid €0.30 higher. Each listing includes a name, a one-line pitch, a clickable link and a public click counter. There's also a daily leaderboard that resets each day, plus a paid detail page (fiche).
- As of 2026-11-07, the top slot is Linkavista at €910.30, with a link carrying the founder's referral code
ref=Julien2976. #2 is Hitworkers at €600, #3 is SEO House at €530. Per/api/board, the earliest listing dates to 2026-08-24 07:42 UTC. - Founder Julien Jimenez (he's the one registered on TrustMRR). His day job is e-reputation and Google cleanup (jimenezjulien.eu). He also runs floobits.com, netmeg.net (533 sites), idealx.org and other French e-commerce site directories, plus hundreds of exact-match affiliate sites such as
xxxaccessia.comandbaintextilia.com. - Web only, no app.
2. Competitors and similar apps
| Name | Form | Launched | Scale | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| outbid.lol (Jonathan Wilke) | Web, original | 2026-08-19 | X trended 3 days straight (22.9K and 13.5K posts). Nearly $100K in two days, roughly $150K+ lifetime. The top slot tutti.so made $16K. Tranco was 349k at end of September; 10-29 has dropped out of the top 1M (traffic library). | The original, in English, for the global indie hacker crowd. premierdelaclasse is the French localized version, priced an order of magnitude lower. |
| Other clones tracked by outbid.fyi | Web | From ¥2026-08-21 | 354 in total, $508K lifetime (outbid.fyi homepage). Most are ghost towns. | Most are generic English charts, or map and pixel-grid gimmicks. |
| outbid.green / Template League / warmap.lol | Web | 2026-08 | TrustMRR lifetime $17.4K / $87.7K / $10.2K; last 30 days $3,252 / $0 / $527 | English, global. Template League has already shut down. |
| ecombid.io | Web, France | 2026-08-24 | TrustMRR lifetime $1,446, last 30 days $0 | A French e-commerce version launched the same day. Nobody buys it anymore. |
| bidrpg.lol / rankbid.io | Web, France | 2025-10 / 2024 | Lifetime $2,395 / $259 | Gamified, English |
| idealx.org | Web | 2026-10 | 302 sites, 28 clicks | The founder's own sister leaderboard (French e-commerce ranking, "rang s'achète dès 1€"). premierdelaclasse ranks #1 there. |
| Linkavista / Linksgarden / SEO House / Paperclub and other netlinking platforms | Web | Already around | France's mature market for buying backlinks | This is where buyer budgets actually go. premierdelaclasse works as a one-time, permanent, publicly ranked backlink slot, and these platforms end up buying placements on it. |
| LinkedIn Top Startups, Maddyness, TPC and other French startup rankings | Press | Once a year | Authoritative | premierdelaclasse's copy mocks them directly ("all startup rankings are lying to you: opaque judges, self-set algorithms, a dash of connections" — from the founder's LinkedIn post). |
3. Data: how far real money and the board numbers diverge
- TrustMRR (Stripe-verified): lifetime $7,718; by month, August $4,174, September $1,355, October $2,181; last 30 days $2,049, previous 7 days $0 (indie library, synced 2026-11-07). The money from the last 30 days is concentrated between 10-07 and 10-16 (10-12 $766, 10-14 $696), and there has been almost no new revenue since 10-22.
- Board:
statsshows €27,687 lifetime across 831 listings. Split by listing date, the 500 visible entries look like this:- Starting 2026-10-31 07:25, roughly one per second, in alphabetical order, 297 French e-commerce affiliate sites were listed, each at exactly €52, totaling €15,444.
- On 2026-10-23 06:11, the same method added 20 more, each at €54. The same day, idealx.org (the founder's own site) added €500.
- Stripe daily revenue over the same stretch was only $1.1 and $44.9, so these payments didn't come through Stripe. Spot-checked sites (baintextilia.com, airfryaccess.com and others) all appear in the founder's idealx / floobits / netmeg directories. Conclusion: roughly €21K on the board was listed by the founder himself. Real outside buyers are mainly SEO and netlinking tools (Linkavista, SEO House, Linksgarden, ChatSEO, Pixbid) and small French SaaS (Klubizz, ULTIME.Bio). 11-04's Hitworkers at €600 and Linkavista at €200 also don't show up in Stripe (not verified whether they used another payment method).
- Clicks: the 500 visible listings total 4,807 clicks, with Linkavista alone at 294. A third-party site, outbid.fyi, puts the median cost per click at €6.32, value grade D (23/100).
- Rank: Tranco 2026-09-03 534k → 09-17 162k → 10-01 105k → 10-31 87,142 (best) → 11-05 91,041 (starting to slide). CrUX only put it in the top 500k in France (August, September), and it never reached the global top 1M.
- For comparison: the original outbid.lol hit over a million visitors in August, yet Tranco only got it to the hundreds of thousands and it has now dropped out of the top 1M. premierdelaclasse gets far fewer visitors but ranks much higher. Tranco includes Majestic (which counts how many distinct sites link to a domain). The founder's hundreds of sites, directories and blog banners (jimenezjulien.com carries a premierdelaclasse dofollow banner at the bottom of every post) all point to it, and hundreds of clone leaderboards and directories link to each other (TrustMRR shows Ahrefs DR 74). So the ranking comes mostly from link building, not from that many real visitors.
4. Where users come from (growth tactics)
- Riding outbid.lol's X trend (confirmed): outbid.lol launched 8-19, and from 8-21 to 8-24 it trended on X for consecutive days. premierdelaclasse launched 8-24 and was listed the same day in X's Grok trending summary, "Outbid.lol Leaderboard Bids Soar Past $17,000 in Days", among the clone sites ("premierdelaclasse.lol — $1.7K (1.8K visitors)", per the Jina search summary, x.com/i/trending/2091808473910816939). August's $4,174 mostly came from this wave: 8-24 and 8-25 saw 55 listings, €3.5K.
- Founder's LinkedIn (confirmed, small reach): 8-27 posted "Tous les classements de startups vous mentent un peu…", with 1 likes and 4 comments.
- Own sites linking to each other, sending traffic (confirmed): floobits.com, netmeg.net and idealx.org all file it under the "Éditeur" category. The jimenezjulien.com blog carries a banner on every post, and hundreds of affiliate sites link into its leaderboard (a two-way link). This is what drives its DR and Tranco rank.
- Directory sites and SEO content (confirmed): outbid.fyi listing page, TrustMRR's public revenue page, leswizards.com affiliate directory, a Pinterest pin, and corporate360.fr, a typical AI-spun / link-buying article titled "Combien coûte une participation à premierdelaclasse.lol" (How much does a listing on premierdelaclasse.lol cost).
- Buyer's internal referral link (confirmed): Linkavista's link carries the founder's referral code, meaning he is himself a referrer on a netlinking platform. The buyer and he belong to the same French SEO circle.
- Ads: googleads library shows no_ads, no spend found. In the X corpus (x-radar, 90 days), searching premierdelaclasse returns 0.
5. Why it took off and why people still pay
- Timing: outbid.lol stirred up the "pay to rank first" meme on X, and premierdelaclasse shipped a French version the next day, catching the first wave of curiosity and French indie copycat money (August $4.2K, 54% of all revenue).
- Localization: in French and the French startup scene, it was the first and most complete (outbid.fyi calls it "one of the more complete regional boards"). Priced in euros from €0.30, with categories and profile pages, it can compete with local French startup rankings.
- What it actually sells is backlinks: once the hype faded, revenue at most clones went to zero (ecombid.io, Template League, SiliconCity all $0 over the last 30 days), while premierdelaclasse still had $2.2K in October. Its buyers are SEO tools and netlinking platforms. They are buying permanent dofollow links on a site with DR 69–74 and the "French startup" label. The founder is an SEO practitioner himself, and he used a network of sites to push this board's authority up. The more authority it has, the more backlinks it can sell, a self-reinforcing loop.
- The board's numbers are manufactured: the board shows €27.7K and a top spot at €910. These figures get reposted by sites like outbid.fyi and TrustMRR, creating the impression that "people are spending big here" (anchoring effect). But about €21K of it was listed by the founder himself.
6. Differentiation
Compared with outbid.lol and hundreds of English clones, what sets it apart is: a specific audience (French, startups) plus an SEO site network behind it that supplies link authority. Localization won it the first wave of money. The network and SEO-circle connections let it keep earning from backlink sales after the hype faded. The latter is what truly separates it from the other clones that died. But it is small (total Stripe revenue $7.7K), and most of its Tranco ranking is an artifact of backlinks. Strictly speaking it hasn't "broken out"; it's more a small but real backlink business.
7. What to borrow
- When a hit mechanism appears, a local-language, specific-audience version built within 24 hours can catch the first wave of money.
- Packaging "paid ranking" as a publicly verifiable backlink slot, sold to SEO and netlinking buyers, lasts longer than selling "exposure."
- Use owned site networks and directory sites to pile backlinks and DR onto a new site, then sell the DR as the pitch. The cost is that both the board numbers and traffic rankings get distorted.
- Third-party stats sites (outbid.fyi) are another business within this wave: ad slots at $150–250 per month.
8. Still unclear
- Whether the large listings (Hitworkers €600, Linkavista €200, Benoit Boddaert €530, etc.) are real payments (through channels other than Stripe) or insider / self-listed is unverified.
- The breakdown of the Tranco ranking across Majestic, DNS, and Cloudflare is not visible. "Built by backlinks" is an inference, based on: far higher than the original, CrUX only reaches the top 500k tier in France, and the site network has links.
- The "visiteurs" counter on the page and actual traffic are unknown.
- Registration info not checked (self-reported founding date on TrustMRR 2024-11-15; 2026-05 has $7 revenue, possibly a prior project on the same Stripe account).