Terms of placement

GulfThrone rents advertising space. A position gives you the right to display your logo, brand name, one short message and one outbound link in one of 12 positions on gulfthrone.com, for as long as your total contribution keeps you inside those 12 positions.

A position is not an equity stake, a partnership, a franchise, a licence to use the GulfThrone name, or a claim on any asset. It is advertising space and nothing more.

On this page, we and us mean GulfThrone, which the placement agreement calls the Publisher and, in some clauses, the Seller. You and your mean the advertiser, which that agreement calls the Advertiser and, in some clauses, the Buyer. Each pair of names refers to the same party throughout.

There is no price for a position. You contribute an amount, and where you sit is decided by your total — the sum of every contribution we have confirmed as received. The entry minimum is $10,000 and nothing below it is accepted.

All 12 positions are ordered by total alone, the Throne included, so passing the brand above you costs one dollar more than its total. Where two totals are equal, whoever paid first ranks higher.

You may add to your total at any time, including after you have stopped being displayed. Contributions are cumulative and nothing expires: an addition is added to what is already there, and no total is ever reduced.

A contribution counts from the moment we confirm the money has reached our account, and not before. An unconfirmed payment moves nothing.

Our prices are net. Bank transfer fees and currency conversion costs are yours to bear, and so is any tax, statutory duty, withholding tax or VAT charged in your jurisdiction. If your local law requires you to deduct or withhold tax from the payment, you must gross the payment up so that the amount reaching our account is the full invoiced amount.

This is the part to be sure of before you pay. No length of time in any position is guaranteed. Your placement is displayed only for as long as your total contribution remains within the highest 12 totals.

Your position may fall, and you may cease to be displayed on the board altogether, whenever brands making larger contributions arrive. We do not promise, guarantee or imply any period of display.

We are not obliged to restrict, delay or refuse anybody else's contribution in order to protect your position. The ranking is the product, and recalculating it is the service working rather than failing.

Being passed is not a fault, a breach, or a ground for a refund. Your total is not reduced by it, and your brand, your total and how long you were displayed stay published on the Fallen list below the board.

Payment is by bank transfer only. No card details are collected on this site and no payment is taken through it.

After you submit the form we email you a proforma invoice with our bank details. Once the funds have cleared and we have confirmed them, we set the moment your brand enters the board and tell you that moment in writing. Your placement appears at it.

Submitting the form is a request, not a concluded contract, and it reserves nothing: a position is taken by having paid, not by having asked. The contract to publish forms when we publish you. These terms, including the Refunds section below, govern your application and your payment from the moment we accept them.

If we decline to publish your placement — or it is not published for any reason other than your own withdrawal — the full amount we received is returned to the account it was paid from. Nothing was displayed, and we do not keep money for a service we did not provide.

You may also change your mind before publication, by telling us in writing. If that reaches us more than 48 hours before the moment we gave you, the full amount we received is returned. Inside those 48 hours it is not: by then the placement has been committed to and prepared, and that is what you would be releasing.

If we never gave you a go-live moment in writing, that window has not started, and a withdrawal received at any time before you are published is refunded in full. And if we bring your publication forward, your window is still measured against the moment we last told you — we cannot shorten it by publishing early.

Once your placement has been published nothing is refundable, in whole or in part. That includes a fall in your position, ceasing to be displayed on the board, asking us to remove you, and our removing the placement under the Content we do not accept section. What you paid for is a standing calculated from confirmed totals, and calculating it again is what you paid for.

A refund that falls due under these terms is paid within 10 business days — counted from our decision not to publish, from our receipt of your withdrawal, or from the day it otherwise becomes clear the placement will not go up — to the account the payment came from.

If the site is unavailable, the remedy is the one described in the Availability section, and it is not a refund.

We decline placements for adult content, gambling, unlicensed financial or investment services, counterfeit or replica goods, weapons, recreational drugs, and anything unlawful in the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or Türkiye.

We also decline content that infringes a third party’s trademark or copyright, that impersonates another business, or that is deceptive.

You confirm that everything you send us complies with the applicable laws, the public morality and the media regulations of the GCC countries, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

We may reject, suspend or immediately remove any placement on these grounds, at any point and without prior notice. If we reject it before it is published, the full amount we received is refunded. If we suspend or remove it after it is published, no refund and no compensation are due.

The board states your brand name, your logo, your position, your total contribution and how many days you have held that position. If you are passed out of the top twelve, you are listed below the board with your brand name, your total and how long you were displayed, and that listing stays.

If you hold position one, your reign is additionally entered in the Hall of Reign: when you took the Throne, the total you took it on, how long you held it, and which brand succeeded you. That entry stays after the Throne has passed.

This is deliberate and it is part of what a position is: the standing changes, the record of having held it does not. Both pages are public and open to search engines.

Nothing else is published. Your name, email address and phone number never appear there. We will remove an entry if you ask us to in writing.

You may replace your logo, message or link up to 3 times per calendar month at no charge. Email the new material to us and we will update your placement within two business days.

Further changes in the same month may be made at our discretion.

We aim to keep the site available for 99% of the time, measured in aggregate. We do not guarantee uninterrupted service, and brief outages, maintenance windows and events outside our reasonable control do not entitle you to a refund.

If technical downtime or a server outage runs for more than 24 consecutive hours, we restore the display as soon as we are able, and we will confirm the length of the outage in writing if you ask. That is the whole of the remedy: downtime does not entitle you to a refund of any part of what you have paid, to compensation, or to end the contract.

We make no promise about traffic volume, impressions, clicks, enquiries or any commercial outcome. You are renting a position on a page, not a result.

You confirm that you hold all the rights, licences and permissions needed for the logo, trademarks and materials you submit, and that displaying them does not infringe anyone’s rights.

If a third party brings a claim against us, or a regulator fines us, over material you supplied, you will defend us, meet the cost and hold us harmless. That covers claims of intellectual property infringement and the unauthorised use of material in your placement, together with the liabilities and legal costs that come with them.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability in connection with a placement, whether in contract, tort or otherwise, is capped at what you have actually paid us in the twelve months before whatever gave rise to the claim. Totals here are cumulative and nothing expires, so a brand can still be displayed on money paid longer ago than that; the cap counts the twelve months, not the total.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, punitive, special or consequential loss, including loss of profits, revenue or business reputation.

Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Neither of us is liable for delay or failure to perform — payment obligations aside — caused by events beyond our reasonable control. That includes acts of God, cyber-attacks, DDoS disruption, national telecommunications infrastructure failures, government restrictions, and changes to regional internet access regulations.

Advertisers displayed on gulfthrone.com are advertisers. Their presence is not an endorsement, a recommendation, a partnership or a verification of any kind by GulfThrone, and nothing on the site should be read as such.

Outbound links from seats carry rel="sponsored nofollow" markup, as required for paid placements.

These terms are governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).

Any dispute is referred to and finally resolved by the Small Claims Tribunal (SCT) of the DIFC Courts. By accepting these terms you opt in to the jurisdiction of the DIFC Courts and the SCT under Rule 53.2 of the Rules of the DIFC Courts. Proceedings are conducted entirely in English, and hearings may be held remotely.

We will both try in good faith to settle any dispute by discussion before proceedings begin. If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the remainder continues in force.

This page is published in English and Arabic. If the two texts differ, the English text prevails.

This page is a summary. The placement agreement and the proforma invoice are the full terms of the deal, and where anything here differs from the placement agreement, the agreement prevails.

Questions about these terms, or about a live placement, should go to the contact address in the footer of this site.