Most of these sites die within a week. The ones that don't share a small number of design decisions, and none of them are about the payment.
The basic shape is always the same: pay money, appear on a public list, get ranked by how much you paid. What separates the versions that hold attention from the ones that flatline is entirely in the mechanics around that.
A leaderboard where positions are permanent is just a wall of names. It sells to each person once and then stops.
Making the top spot takeable turns a purchase into an ongoing contest. Every person who's ever held it is a candidate to pay again. This is the single biggest difference between formats that generate repeat activity and formats that don't.
Any board that runs forever eventually reaches a state where the leader is so far ahead that nobody rational will challenge them. At that point the game is over, even though the site is still up.
A reset — a season, a fortnight, a month — solves this. It caps how far ahead anyone can get and guarantees a recurring moment where the whole thing is winnable again from zero.
Here's the tension. Resets keep the contest alive, but they also wipe out the thing people paid for. If your position vanishes every fortnight, what exactly did you buy?
The fix most formats land on is running two boards at once:
The seasonal board is the game. The lifetime board is the receipt.
The most valuable moment in one of these isn't a signup. It's the instant someone gets knocked off — because it's specific, timestamped, involves named people, and cannot be faked.
Formats that capture and publish that moment have an endless supply of genuine content. Formats that don't are stuck making generic promotional material about a leaderboard, which nobody wants to look at.
Nobody shares "there is a leaderboard." People share "Dave just got knocked off after four hours."
The hardest problem is the first one. A leaderboard with nobody on it gives a visitor no target, no context, and no evidence anyone else thought this was worth doing.
There's a dishonest fix — inventing names — and it's a bad idea, because these formats live on the claim that the numbers are real. Once you've faked the board, the one genuinely interesting thing about your site is a lie, and anyone who works it out has a story worth telling about you.
The honest fix is to seed it with real people who know exactly what they're doing: the founder, their mates, anyone happy to spend five dollars on a joke. Small, real, and defensible.
State the "you receive nothing" part loudly and early. It reads as confidence, it's the funniest thing about the format, and it keeps you well clear of implying a return you can't deliver.
The Belt runs all six: a takeable top spot, a fortnightly season reset, a permanent lifetime wall, a live feed of every dethrone, and a $5 minimum with no prize attached. Rules here, or read where the format came from.