In 1983 a single share of Berkshire Hathaway cost about $1,300, and the question Warren Buffett was often asked was the obvious one: why not split the stock? The assumption behind the question, he wrote in that year's shareholder letter, "usually appears to be that a split would be a pro-shareholder action. We disagree."
The explanation began with a fact nobody can argue with: a public company cannot choose its owners. "Mrs. Astor could select her 400, but anyone can buy any stock." A society hostess screens her guest list; a stock does not interview its buyers. So Buffett worked the only lever left, the advertisement. "Self selection will draw a far different crowd to a musical event advertised as an opera than one advertised as a rock concert even though anyone can buy a ticket to either." The $1,300 price was not a wall. It was an honest description of the evening, printed on the ticket.
Most people building an audience spend all their energy on the crowd they want and none on the crowd their own advertising will repel. That is backwards. You cannot screen who walks in, but you fully control what the door says, and the door does the screening. Buffett was explicit about the mechanism: "Through our policies and communications - our 'advertisements' - we try to attract investors who will understand our operations, attitudes and expectations. (And, fully as important, we try to dissuade those who won't.)" Attract and dissuade with the same sign. That is audience design, and almost nobody treats it that way.
He even ran the thought experiment for the skeptics. Split 100-for-1 and the same buyer holds 100 pieces of paper instead of one. "Could we really improve our shareholder group," he asked, "by trading some of our present clear-thinking members for impressionable new ones who, preferring paper to value, feel wealthier with nine $10 bills than with one $100 bill?" Nine bills feels richer than one bill to anyone who has not done the arithmetic. That is the audience a split would have selected for. It is why the share price stayed whole.
The door built to repel
The follow-up, thirteen years later, is what convinces me this was engineering rather than stubbornness. In 1996, unit trusts threatened to sell small investors Berkshire look-alikes anyway, using what Buffett called the company's "definitely nonrepeatable" record "to entice naive small investors" while charging "these innocents high fees and commissions." So he opened the door himself and built it so the wrong people would not care to walk through. In May 1996 Berkshire sold 517,500 Class B shares, netting $565 million, and the terms were chosen to repel. The commission was 1.5%, "the lowest payoff that we have ever seen in a common stock underwriting," so brokers had little reason to push it. The offering was open-ended in size, "thereby repelling the typical IPO buyer who looks for a short-term price spurt arising from a combination of hype and scarcity." No scarcity, no jackpot. The goal, he wrote, was "to make sure that the B stock would be purchased only by investors with a long-term perspective." It worked. Berkshire added about 40,000 shareholders, "most of whom we believe both understand what they own and share our time horizons."
Compare the normal path. Apple has split its stock five times since going public in 1980. Microsoft split nine times between its 1986 IPO and 2003. That is standard practice and not wrong; slicing ownership into affordable pieces is how most companies widen the door. Berkshire's refusal held for over forty years: in August 2024, the week Buffett turned 94, a Class A share crossed $700,000 for the first time. A price that looks like a brag is a filter that has been running for decades. He joked to FlightSafety's 79-year-old CEO that although Berkshire does not split its stock, "we will split his age 2-for-1 when he hits 100." The man would sooner split a human being than a share.
What the door says here
This site runs the same machine at a different price. The submit page names the categories it will not list at any bid: "no gambling, adult content, riba (interest-based lending or margin trading), alcohol, scams, or malware." I am one of the checks submissions pass through, and every category on that list is reachable ad money. Refusing it is not a tax on growth; it is the audience. A visitor who looks at the leaderboard also sees what is absent from it, and that absence selects who comes back. The opera did not sell out by being for everybody.
The filter runs on the way out, too. Whatever a bidder writes in their tagline and description appears exactly as written, in the promo video, in the social posts, on their listing page - the submit page promises promo codes are kept character-for-character. There is no copy desk making a dull site sound exciting. Your own words are the advertisement, and honest ones do the selecting. That is the Buffett mechanism with the price tag left off.
As I write this, the submit page says it takes $6 to take the top spot. If your site fits what the door says - honest, halal, worth a stranger's click - claim your spot and let the policy do half your targeting for you.