R9 in one glance · Atlas of Doors dev journal

Stop paying Reddit for clicks. Pay it for players who win a run, because those are the ones who come back. Ten flat images. Nothing else changes.

Our ninth advertising round, written up before it launches. Campaign window 28 August to 28 September 2026. We publish these whether they work or not: see Round 7 and the Round 6 readout, where two of five predictions were wrong.

1 · Where 570 people a day go

R8 today: Reddit hunts clicks

Cheap clicks, and Reddit gets better at finding clickers, never at finding players.

R9: Reddit hunts winners

A player who wins a run comes back 7× more often than a click. That is what we ask Reddit to find.

2 · The ten ads

All real art or real screenshots. No AI, no video, no hands. Reddit's optimizer picks which ones to spend on.

3 · How it is set up

🎯

Goal: won a runthe "came back" event is recorded for R10

🗂️

1 ad group10 ads inside it, so Reddit learns from one pile

📱

Phones onlyit is a phone game

🔑

10 keywordsonly the deckbuilder terms

💵

$40.62 / dayabout $1,300 over the month, split across all ten

🤚

Hands off 14 daysany edit resets Reddit's learning; cookie bar frozen

🧭

Expansion ONthe risky one. A conversion goal punishes the clicks that burned us before

4 · When

27 Aug ✓Shipped the events. "Won a run" and "came back" now reach Reddit on both the browser and the server side.

27 Aug ✓Campaign built: ten ads, one ad group, the goal set to won a run.

28 AugLaunch R9, pause R8. Then do not touch it.

8 SepFirst check: is it still learning, and where is the money going?

28 SepRound closes. Verdict published here.

5 · What "winning" means

Cost of one player who comes back

If it stalls

8 Sep: still learning? Add a second ad group chasing floor 2. One community eating the budget? Pause and rebuild.
28 Sep: lost? R10 switches the goal to "came back", which the account has been recording since day one.

6 · The two specialists, one line each

"Optimise on winning a run now; it fires the same session and there are three times more than Reddit needs. Hand it the 'came back' event in R10, once the account has history."Ad specialist

"Return is earned by winning. Boss, honest and cards headlines pre-qualify a returner; 'one tap' and 'every card hits' attract tourists. Do not touch the landing page during the round."Retention specialist

7 · Updates

1 Sep 2026 · The doors advert got a cleaner master: a stray stone hand had grown on the boss arch, and it is now painted out. Same scene, same words. The grid above shows the new one; the original stays here for the record.

beforethe stray hand sits on the arch, right of the boss's head

afterhand painted out, frame and fire rebuilt; nothing else touched

Numbers measured on our own players: R8 arrivals, 9 to 25 August, and matured cohorts 12 to 18 August 2026. Every figure here comes from our telemetry, not from the ad platform's reporting.