Promoted listings
Some results in this catalogue are paid for. This page says exactly what that buys, because a ranking effect nobody can inspect is one nobody can check.
How you can tell
Every paid placement carries a Promoted label, on the result itself and on the plugin's own page. Not in a footnote, not on hover, not only on the search page — wherever the listing appears, the label appears with it. The label is a link, and it points here: if you have noticed it, you are the person most likely to want this page.
It does not say "Sponsored", deliberately. The UK advertising regulator advises against that word because readers take it to mean several different things, most of them not "someone paid for this".
What it changes
Search here fuses two signals — how well your words match a plugin's name and text, and how close your meaning is to what the plugin does. That produces a score, and results are sorted by it.
A paid placement multiplies that score by 1.25, and nothing else.
Three things bound it, and one thing it deliberately does not do.
It cannot put a plugin in a search it does not match. Promotion is applied after the search has finished, to the results the search already found. It reorders them; it never adds one. A multiplier makes this structural rather than a rule someone has to remember — anything multiplied by 1.25 is still nothing.
It does nothing at all for a weak match. Scoring above zero is a low bar: a single word in a description clears it. A placement only applies above a relevance floor, so a promoted reverb stays absent from a search for "granular synthesiser" instead of creeping up it.
At most two paid placements appear on one page of results, and at most one of them from any one vendor. The second half matters because a Pro subscription allows a vendor to promote every plugin they make, and the larger vendors here have thirty to fifty. A subscription buys prominence; it does not buy the promoted area.
And the thing it deliberately does not do: reserve any position. A placement can come first, and it is labelled when it does.
That is a choice, and it is worth being plain about. A vendor paying for placement expects to be seen, and a page that quietly capped them at third would be selling something other than what was bought. What makes it acceptable is the label and the two bounds above: a paid result at the top of a list it genuinely belongs in is advertising doing what advertising does, and you can see that it is one.
Being first is permitted rather than purchased, though. The boost is a multiplier, so a substantially better match still wins — a promoted plugin scoring 0.6 against a 1.4 match is lifted to 0.75 and stays second.
Browsing is not affected at all. /plugins, the category pages and the
alphabetical listings are unranked, so there is nothing there for money to
change, and it does not.
The exact numbers
They are in the repository, in config/preferences.js, under
PROMOTION_CONFIG:
| Setting | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
boostFactor |
1.25 | multiplier on a promoted result's score |
floor |
0.45 | how well it must already match before that applies |
maxPromotedRank |
1 | the best position a placement can be lifted into |
maxPromotedPerPage |
2 | paid placements per page of results |
maxPromotedPerVendor |
1 | of those, how many one vendor may hold |
termDays |
365 | how long a placement runs |
Changing any of them changes what is written above, which is why they are one list with one home rather than constants scattered through a sort function.
What money does not buy
- Facts. A plugin's description, its formats, its measurements and its licence are what they are. A paid placement changes where a listing appears and nothing about what it says.
- Removal of anything. Promotion never hides, filters or downranks anybody else's plugin. It is a re-rank of results that were all going to be returned, and everything that would have been on the page is still on the page.
- Measurements. The profiler does not know what is promoted, and a verdict
of
crashedstayscrashed. - Editorial. Wiki pages are contributors' work under their own licence.
What it costs
Two ways to buy a placement, both in euros:
| €10 | one plugin promoted for a year — a one-time payment, not a subscription |
| €99 a year | Plugin Universe Pro: promote as many of your plugins as you like |
Neither buys anything listed under What money does not buy above, and both are labelled identically. A reader cannot tell which of the two paid for a placement, because it makes no difference to what the label means.
How long it lasts
A year, and then it stops. Expiry is read from the record every time a search runs, so a placement that has reached its date stops being applied immediately — there is no scheduled job whose failure could leave an advertisement running for free indefinitely.
A placement can also be ended early, which is recorded as the placement stopping at that moment rather than as a separate status.
The record
Every placement is stored as data: what was promoted, from when, until when, and who authorised it. Promotions that have expired or been withdrawn are kept, because a list of only what is running today answers none of the questions worth asking about advertising.
Why this page exists
Two sets of rules ask for it, and both are reasonable.
The EU Digital Services Act requires that advertisements be clearly identifiable as such, that the reader be told on whose behalf, and that the main parameters used to rank them be disclosed. The UK ASA and CAP rules require disclosure that is immediate, prominent and understandable.
Building to that standard from the start costs almost nothing. Retrofitting it after somebody complains costs a great deal, and by then the complaint is already right.
If a placement here looks wrong to you — mislabelled, expired but still showing, or ranking somewhere it should not — please say so. That is a defect, and it is one worth hearing about.