Which contest platforms we work with

Most agencies dodge this question. We get it on the first call, every time, and the honest answer takes longer than a sentence. So here is the long version, written down once, so you can read it before you pay us anything.

We promote your entry page — the public URL the contest host gave you. We drive interested humans to look at it. What they do next is their decision. That sounds obvious. It is not, because half of the platforms in this space have terms that quietly forbid even that, and a quarter of them have no terms at all. We sort them so you do not have to.

The short list: platforms we currently accept work on

If your contest runs on one of the four below, and your specific entry meets a few extra checks we describe further down, we will probably quote you within 48 hours.

1. Gleam.io — their published competition terms allow third-party promotion of entry links as long as the entrant is the one taking the action. We have read the current version and re-read it after their 2024 policy refresh.
2. Woobox — the platform itself is a tool used by brands; the contest rules live inside the host brand's promotion. We accept Woobox work when the host brand publishes a clear T&C document linked from the entry page.
3. Tilda-based contests — small and mid-size European brands often build the entry form on Tilda with rules pasted right onto the page. This is fine. The rules are visible, the entry is a normal web page, our work is normal traffic.
4. Custom WordPress contests with a publicly linked rules page (usually /rules or /regulamin) and a named organizer with a real registered address.

That is the whole list as of the date stamped on this article. We add platforms when we have read their current ToS end to end and confirmed no clause forbids paid promotion of entrant traffic. We remove them the same week if anything changes.

What we will not work with, and why

This is the part that loses us money. We turn down roughly 31% of inbound inquiries on platform grounds alone, before we even look at the campaign goals. Here is what disqualifies a project.

Platforms that obscure their rules

If the rules document is behind a login, written only in screenshots, or rewritten mid-contest without a version history, we walk away. A contest whose rules can change at 23:00 on a Tuesday is not a contest we can promote in good conscience. You might still win it. We cannot help you do so without risking a complaint that you do not deserve.

Platforms with no published terms at all

You would be surprised how many "competitions" on Telegram channels and obscure voting widgets have literally zero T&C. There is nothing to read. There is no organizer name. There is no prize fulfillment clause. We will not run paid traffic to a page that cannot tell us, in writing, what the prize is and who is liable. This is partly self-protection — the EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (Directive 2005/29/EC, see eur-lex.europa.eu) treats undisclosed promotional terms as a misleading omission, and our Meta and Google ad accounts live or die by that kind of rule.

Platforms hosting contests for sanctioned entities

We are a Minsk-based company. We comply with EU and US sanctions lists. If the contest organizer or the sponsor brand appears on a current sanctions list, the answer is no. There is no payment we will accept to change that. We check the EU Consolidated Financial Sanctions list at the start of every engagement.

Platforms whose own ToS prohibits paid promotion of entries

This is the subtle one. Some platforms — especially the ones built for "viral" voting contests — explicitly forbid entrants from running paid advertising to their own entry. The platform's own house rules trump everything else, including what the sponsor brand wants. If a platform's ToS says "no paid traffic," we cannot run paid traffic there, full stop. Reading that paragraph is the first thing we do.

The actual checking process

Before we send you a quote, here is what one of us reads, in order:

1. The platform's general Terms of Service.
2. The platform's promotion-specific or contest-specific terms (often a separate document).
3. The host brand's contest rules page.
4. The current version of Meta's Promotion Guidelines (we last re-checked the published version on 14 February 2025, available at facebook.com/policies).
5. Google Ads' Misrepresentation policy (the revision effective 24 May 2024 is the version we work from; see support.google.com).

If all five documents are compatible with what you are asking us to do, we proceed. If any one of them is not, we tell you which clause is the problem and what would have to change for us to take the job. Sometimes the fix is small — adding a sentence to your landing page, for example. Sometimes it is unfixable, and we say so on the same call.

A real example, lightly anonymized

Last autumn a contestant from Wrocław contacted us about a baking competition hosted on a small Polish platform we had not seen before. The prize was a 3,400 PLN stand mixer. She was in the top 12, voting was open for 17 more days, and she wanted Meta traffic to her entry page. We spent about 90 minutes reading the platform's ToS in two languages.

The platform allowed promotion. The host brand's rules allowed promotion. Meta's current policy allowed promotion of the entry page format she had. But the entry page itself displayed her full home address by default, which would have made the Meta ad fail review under the personal data clause. We told her not to pay us until she asked the host to hide that field. They did, 48 hours later. We then ran the campaign for nine days. She finished 4th — she did not win — but the campaign did exactly what we were paid to do: it brought her real, interested visitors who chose to vote or not.

We mention this not because it is a success story. It is a normal Tuesday. We mention it because the small reading step at the beginning is the entire job. The ads after that are not the hard part.

A mildly contrarian opinion about "viral" voting platforms

The contest industry has a long tail of voting platforms that present themselves as neutral infrastructure but exist mainly so that people will buy traffic and votes from grey-market sellers. We think these platforms are bad for entrants. They lower the perceived legitimacy of every honest contest in the same category. When we decline to work on one of them, it is not snobbery — it is that running paid Meta ads to a page that visibly attracts vote-buying signals will get the ad account flagged within a day or two. We have watched it happen to other people's accounts. Once is enough.

The platforms on our short list above are boring by comparison. Boring is what we want. Boring means the contest is real, the rules are written down, and our traffic gets to do its job.

What we will not do, even on platforms we accept

This is important enough to repeat in its own section. Even on Gleam, Woobox, Tilda contests, and clean custom WordPress builds, there are things we refuse:

• We will not log into your contest account or the platform on your behalf. Your credentials stay with you.
• We will not buy votes, hire vote-clickers, or use any service that promises votes for money. There is no version of this we are willing to do.
• We will not promise a finishing position, a percentage lift, or a guaranteed number of votes. Anyone who does is either lying or about to disappoint you.
• We will not run ads to entries whose landing pages contain claims we cannot verify (medical results, financial outcomes, etc.).
• We will not continue a campaign past the moment a platform updates its ToS in a way that conflicts with what we are doing. We pause the same day and refund unspent budget per our refund policy.

What happens if a platform changes its rules mid-campaign

It happens. Vyper, for example, shut its contest product down on 12 September 2024, with limited notice to active hosts. We had two campaigns running on Vyper-hosted entries when the announcement landed. We paused both within four hours, told both clients what we knew, and refunded the unused budget the same week. This is the deal. If the platform under your contest becomes unworkable, we stop working on it; we do not keep spending your money to look busy.

The same logic applies to ad-platform changes. When Google updated its Misrepresentation policy in May 2024, we re-audited every active campaign within 72 hours. Two needed minor copy changes. One needed a landing-page change the client agreed to. None of them needed to be killed, but we were ready to kill them if needed.

An honest limitation

We do not read Mandarin, Arabic, or Hindi well enough to audit terms documents written in those languages. If your contest is hosted on a platform whose primary ToS is published only in one of those languages, we will say so honestly and decline the work. We got this wrong once in 2023 — we accepted a job based on a machine-translated ToS, and a clause we had missed in the original Mandarin caused us to pause the campaign on day three. The client was understanding. We refunded. We do not do that anymore.

We also do not work with contests run by political parties, contests with religious eligibility requirements, or contests whose prize involves crypto tokens not registered under EU MiCA. Those are policy choices, not capability gaps. They will not change.

How to find out if your contest qualifies

The fastest way is to send us the entry link and the rules link in one message. We respond within one business day with one of three answers: yes and here is a quote; no and here is the specific clause that blocks us; or "we need 24 hours to read carefully, please send the platform's general ToS link too." If you want to understand the full sequence before reaching out, our process page walks through it step by step, and the FAQ handles the questions we get most often.

One last thing. If a different agency has told you they can promote your entry on a platform we have declined, that is not necessarily proof that we are being overly cautious. It might be. It might also be that they have not read the documents we have read. Ask them which clause permits the work. The answer, or the silence, will tell you what you need to know.