Our 7 traffic sources, ranked by 2025-26 ROI

We tested 14 channels between January 2024 and March 2026. Seven survived. The other seven either burned client budget on hollow impressions, broke ad-platform contest rules, or stopped converting once iOS 17.4 and the EU Digital Services Act tightened tracking and political-content surfacing. This page is the honest ranking — what we use now, what we charge for it, and where each channel quietly fails.

One caveat up front. Contest promotion is not e-commerce. We are not optimising for a purchase event with a clean attribution window. We are optimising for an engaged human who reads a campaign description, decides it is worth their attention, and clicks a vote button on a third-party platform we cannot instrument. That asymmetry shapes everything below.

How we ranked these

ROI here means cost per engaged visitor — not cost per click, not cost per impression. An "engaged visitor" is someone who reaches the contest page from our referral and spends more than 11 seconds there, measured via UTM and the limited analytics most contest platforms expose. We average across 23 campaigns we ran for Polish and EU clients during 2024-2025. The seven sources below are listed best-to-worst on that metric, with our actual cost ranges. Pricing is as of writing; ad markets move every quarter.

What we will not do, even for a higher-ranked channel

We do not buy votes. We do not run bot traffic. We do not create sockpuppet accounts. We do not log into the contest platform on a client's behalf. If a channel only "works" by violating the contest's terms or a platform's policy, it is not on this list. More on the boundary in our services page.

1. Niche subreddit organic posts (with 1-2 sponsored placements)

Reddit is back. We said the opposite in 2022. We were wrong.

The shift happened in two waves. First, Google's helpful-content updates from 2023 onward pushed Reddit threads to the top of informational SERPs, which means a well-written organic post keeps acquiring readers for months. Second, Reddit's own advertising API matured, and the conversation-targeted ad format launched in late 2023 lets a sponsored post appear inside threads where contest-relevant discussion already happens. The combination is unusually efficient for our use case.

Our cost range: roughly EUR 0.18 to EUR 0.42 per engaged visitor on organic posts (counting our labour), and EUR 0.60 to EUR 1.10 on sponsored placements depending on subreddit competitiveness. We will not run more than two sponsored posts per campaign because Reddit communities pattern-match aggressively and a third post starts feeling like spam.

What we actually do: identify three to six subreddits where the contest's topic is already discussed (not adjacent — actually discussed), draft a post that names the contest, discloses the client relationship clearly, and asks for honest opinions rather than votes. The disclosure matters. Reddit's self-promotion rules (see the platform's Content Policy) require it, and moderators remove undisclosed promotional posts within hours.

Where this fails: B2B contests, anything where the relevant subreddit has fewer than 8,000 subscribers, and any campaign where the client cannot answer follow-up questions from commenters within a day. If you cannot show up for the conversation, do not start one.

2. Micro-influencer outreach at EUR 50-150 per post

We mean micro literally. The creators we work with have between 2,400 and 38,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok. They charge between EUR 50 and EUR 150 per post, sometimes accept a product trade for the lower band, and convert at rates that humiliate accounts ten times their size.

Why this works: a follower count of 12,000 in a specific Polish design niche outperforms a follower count of 400,000 in "lifestyle" because the niche audience self-selects for the contest's topic. We have one repeat client — a Krakow-based independent ceramics studio entering EU craft awards — for whom three micro-influencer posts at EUR 320 total drove 1,847 engaged visitors over four days. That is roughly EUR 0.17 per engaged visitor. We do not promise this performance again. It was a fit-of-the-niche outlier and we have had campaigns at EUR 1.40 per engaged visitor on the same channel.

The honest limitation: we vet every creator manually, which means we cannot scale this above seven or eight placements per campaign. We also will not work with creators who refuse to disclose the paid relationship per EU consumer protection guidance and local advertising standards in Poland (UOKiK has been active here since the 2022 influencer guidelines).

3. Targeted newsletter sponsorships

This is the channel most agencies forget. Independent newsletter operators in Substack, Beehiiv, and Ghost increasingly sell single-issue sponsorships in the EUR 80 to EUR 600 range depending on subscriber count and open rate. A typical Polish-language tech newsletter with 4,200 engaged subscribers charges around EUR 140 for a 60-word sponsor block.

Our cost range per engaged visitor here runs EUR 0.30 to EUR 0.95. The variance is real. We have had a EUR 220 placement drive almost nothing because the newsletter's audience was tonally wrong, and a EUR 95 placement in a Warsaw food-writing newsletter drive 612 visitors to a culinary contest.

What we will not do: pretend a newsletter sponsorship is editorial coverage. It is paid. We require the operator to mark it as such. If they refuse, we walk. Our process page describes the vetting steps we run before paying any newsletter operator.

4. Discord community partnerships

Discord is undervalued for contest promotion because it is hard to measure. There is no native advertising. There is no click-through report. You partner with a server's moderation team, you get one announcement and maybe a pinned message, and you watch UTM traffic.

For tech-adjacent contests, gaming-adjacent contests, and any contest aimed at an audience under 30, Discord outperforms Instagram on engaged-visitor cost. Our range: EUR 0.40 to EUR 1.20 per engaged visitor, with the labour-heavy work being relationship-building with server admins, not money changing hands. Many admins will run a partner announcement for a small donation to the server or a product giveaway.

The contrarian opinion here: most contest promoters skip Discord because the spreadsheet looks ugly. Cost per impression is unmeasurable. Cost per engaged visitor, when you measure it post-hoc, is competitive with anything else on this list.

5. Instagram targeted boosts (not Facebook)

We boost Instagram posts. We almost never run Facebook campaigns broadly anymore. Three reasons.

1. Meta's Pages, Groups and Events Promotions Policy explicitly prohibits incentivising users to share or vote in ways that contest mechanics often require. The line between a legitimate contest-awareness ad and a policy-violating engagement-bait ad is thinner than most agencies admit, and we have had three accounts restricted in 2024 alone for ads that on review we should have flagged ourselves.
2. Facebook's organic reach for contest-style posts collapsed below 1.8% by late 2024 in our sample. Paid reach delivers, but mostly to passive scrollers who do not convert to engaged visitors at a competitive rate.
3. iOS 17.4, released 5 March 2024, plus the EU DMA enforcement that began the same week, broke enough of Meta's signal pipeline that audience targeting in EU markets visibly degraded for our use case.

Instagram boosts, especially on Reels with strong organic traction already, still work for visual contests (photography, design, food, architecture). Our cost range: EUR 0.55 to EUR 1.80 per engaged visitor. We cap boost spend at EUR 220 per post because diminishing returns set in fast.

6. LinkedIn organic for B2B contests

LinkedIn is narrow but precise. For B2B contests — industry awards, professional recognition programmes, startup competitions — a well-crafted founder post from the client's own account, supported by three or four employee shares, outperforms anything paid.

We do not run paid LinkedIn ads for contest promotion. The CPMs (typically EUR 20-45 in EU markets as of writing) make the engaged-visitor cost uneconomical against this list's other options. Organic, ghost-written and reviewed with the client, lands in the EUR 0.70 to EUR 2.10 range per engaged visitor when you account for our editing time.

Honest limitation: this requires the client to actually have a LinkedIn presence and to actually post under their own name. We had one client refuse to post the draft we wrote because they did not want to "look like I'm asking for votes". They were right to refuse. We refunded that portion of the engagement under our refund policy.

7. Hacker News for tech-adjacent contests

Hacker News goes last because it is unpredictable, unrepeatable, and binary. A submission either gets traction on the front page or it does not. There is no boost button.

When it works, the engaged-visitor cost is effectively the labour of writing the submission — call it EUR 60-90 of our time, against a few thousand visitors if the post catches. When it does not work, you get 14 visitors and a wasted morning. The hit rate in our 2024-25 sample is around 1 submission in 4.

We only recommend HN for genuinely tech-adjacent contests: developer tooling competitions, open-source awards, indie maker showcases. We will not submit a contest that is not authentically of interest to that audience, because the community downvotes promotional submissions ruthlessly and the client's brand absorbs the reputational cost. The HN community guidelines (see news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) are worth reading before any submission.

What we cut from this list

For transparency, here are channels we stopped using and why:

• Facebook ads broadly — covered above. Still occasionally used for over-45 audiences in specific geographies. Not a default.
• Twitter/X ads — the targeting tools we relied on for niche audiences were degraded across 2023-2024, and engaged-visitor cost roughly tripled in our sample.
• TikTok Promote — works for some creators, but the platform's own promotion guidelines make contest-related boosting a compliance minefield we no longer have appetite for.
• Google Search ads — contest-related queries are low-intent for our use case, and Google's Misrepresentation policy applies aggressively to anything that smells like vote-solicitation.
• Programmatic display — engaged-visitor cost never came below EUR 4.20 in our testing. We dropped it in Q2 2024.

How we choose between these for a given campaign

We do not run all seven for any single client. We typically pick three. The choice depends on the contest's audience, the client's available time (LinkedIn organic in particular costs the client hours), and the budget. Most engagements we run sit in the EUR 400-1,800 channel-spend range, with our fee on top. See pricing for the structure.

The selection conversation happens in the first call. We will tell you if your contest is not a fit for our methods — that conversation has happened seven times in the last fourteen months, and each time we declined the engagement rather than spend a client's money on channels we did not believe in.

A note on measurement honesty

The engaged-visitor figures above are our best estimates. Contest platforms vary in what analytics they expose. Some give clean referral data. Some give nothing. Where we cannot measure cleanly, we say so in the campaign report. If you want to understand how we report results back to you, our FAQ covers it. If you want to talk through whether your contest fits any of these channels, get in touch and we will tell you honestly within a working day or two.

One last thing. ROI rankings move. The version of this page from June 2024 had Instagram boosts at number 3 and newsletters at number 5. Six months from now, this list will look different again. We will update it when it does.