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Ranker

Ranker is an American online platform founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Clark Benson in Los Angeles, California, that enables users to collaboratively create, vote on, and rank lists spanning a wide array of topics including entertainment, history, pop culture, lifestyle, and more. The platform operates on a crowdsourced model, leveraging user votes—weighted by factors such as voting history and engagement—to generate dynamic rankings that reflect collective opinions rather than expert curation. This approach has cultivated a vast database of over a billion votes, powering not only public lists but also proprietary machine learning tools for audience insights and personalized recommendations. Ranker has grown into a profitable company with more than 115 employees, attracting approximately 15 million monthly visitors as of late 2025 and ranking among the top websites globally. Beyond its core consumer-facing site, Ranker offers solutions through Ranker Insights, providing data-driven psychographic profiles for brands in , , and consumer goods, and has extended into mobile applications like Watchworthy for TV show suggestions across streaming services. The company has raised over $4 million in funding and continues to expand its influence in the and data analytics space.

Overview

Description

Ranker is an website that features user-generated polls and ranked lists covering diverse topics such as , brands, , , and culture. As a crowdsourced platform, it enables users to contribute to and the order of items within these lists through interactive mechanisms. The core purpose of Ranker is to provide an alternative to traditional user reviews and expert opinions by aggregating collective crowd sentiments into dynamic, hierarchical rankings that reflect broader public preferences. This approach democratizes , allowing rankings to evolve based on up or down votes from visitors, rather than relying on individual endorsements or biased narratives. Since its inception, the platform has collected over 1 billion total votes as of mid-2025, underscoring the scale of user participation in shaping these consensus-driven outcomes. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Ranker is owned and operated by Ranker Inc. Over time, it has evolved from a simple ranking site into a data-driven media company leveraging its vast opinion database for broader insights.

Key Statistics

Ranker attracts approximately 15 million monthly visitors as of late 2025, underscoring its position as a leading platform for crowdsourced rankings. This substantial traffic highlights the site's broad appeal across , pop , and topics, with users engaging deeply through and list curation. The platform's user-generated content further amplifies these metrics by fostering ongoing interactions. In terms of engagement, Ranker records an average of approximately 8 million votes per month as of mid-2025 across its extensive collection of lists. Cumulatively, the site has amassed over 1 billion total votes as of mid-2025, reflecting the scale of community-driven input that powers its rankings. Operationally, Ranker employs approximately 115 people, supporting its , , and business development efforts from its headquarters in . Financially, the company achieved $22 million in revenue in 2017 and scaled to $53.5 million by 2024, demonstrating steady growth in its and services.

History

Founding

Ranker was founded by serial entrepreneur Clark Benson, who sought to address the shortcomings of traditional user reviews, such as five-star rating systems that often resulted in clustered scores around 3.5 to 4 stars without capturing more detailed preferences. Benson envisioned a platform where users could engage in crowdsourced rankings to express nuanced opinions on a wide array of topics, moving beyond binary or simplistic feedback mechanisms to create dynamic, community-driven lists. This concept drew from Benson's prior experience with startups like eCrush, a he sold to Hearst in 2006, and his personal affinity for lists as a way to organize and compare options. The company began development in 2008 and entered a closed beta phase before officially launching in August 2009. From its inception, Ranker focused on enabling users to vote on items within lists across categories like , , and , allowing rankings to evolve based on collective input rather than static reviews. In its early stages, Ranker secured approximately $5 million in , including $4.05 million across three rounds from 2010 to 2013 and possible earlier investment. This included a $750,000 round in February 2010, a $1.3 million Series A in April 2011 backed by investors such as Draper Associates and Rincon Venture Partners, and a $2 million Series A extension in June 2013 from , DCVC, and Bullpen Capital, along with continuing support from early backers like Draper Associates and Rincon Venture Partners. These investments enabled the team to refine the algorithm and expand the site's foundational lists.

Growth and Expansion

Following its launch, Ranker saw rapid growth in user engagement, expanding from a niche platform to a major online destination with 27 million monthly visitors by early 2017. This surge was driven by list-based content and user voting mechanics, which attracted a diverse audience interested in rankings across , pop , and topics. By 2017, the site was collecting over 10 million votes monthly, solidifying its position as a leading consumer preference aggregator. Key milestones marked Ranker's technological evolution, including the 2020 launch of the Watchworthy TV recommendation app, which leveraged the platform's vast user data to suggest content across streaming services. Watchworthy, downloaded over 13,000 times in its first month, introduced algorithms to analyze correlations from more than one billion votes, enabling personalized viewing suggestions based on fan preferences. In March 2024, Watchworthy updated its app to include recommendations on which streaming services to cancel or keep, enhancing personalized content management. This integration of AI and extended to broader data applications, transforming Ranker from a consumer-facing site into a provider capable of generating statistically significant insights on audience behaviors. Expansion efforts further diversified Ranker's operations with the introduction of Ranker Insights in 2020, a B2B platform offering psychographic and personalized recommendation tools derived from over 160 million consumer preference correlations. This shift positioned Ranker as a licensing service for marketers, entertainment studios, and platforms, moving beyond ad-supported to solutions that enhance content discovery and . The platform's focus on post-consumption opinions, such as affinities between shows and music genres, addressed gaps in traditional , with projections indicating it could surpass core site revenues within five years. Ranker's revenue trajectory reflected this maturation, growing from $22 million in 2017 to $45.6 million in 2023 and reaching $53.5 million in 2024. This 17.28% year-over-year increase in 2024 underscored the impact of B2B data services and app integrations on sustainable profitability.

Content and Features

Categories and Lists

Ranker features a wide array of crowdsourced lists organized into primary categories such as entertainment (encompassing films, TV shows, music, and celebrities), sports, gaming, food, brands, culture, history, lifestyle, and politics. These categories cover diverse topics, allowing users to explore rankings on everything from blockbuster movies to political figures and historical events. The platform's lists follow a hierarchical format, where items are ordered based on aggregated user votes, often beginning with open-ended nominations that evolve into structured, definitive orders as participation grows. This vote-driven structure ensures rankings reflect collective opinions, with higher-voted items rising to the top. Representative examples include "The 300+ Best Action Movies Ever Made" in entertainment, "The Most Delicious Flavors" in food, and "The 1000+ Best Athletes Of All Time" in sports. Overall, Ranker hosts tens of thousands of such curated lists across its categories, providing extensive coverage of popular and niche subjects alike. Users contribute to these rankings through and nominations, shaping the evolving order of items.

User Engagement Mechanisms

Ranker's primary user engagement mechanism revolves around its system, where registered users upvote or downvote individual items within crowdsourced lists to influence overall rankings. This process leverages the "wisdom of crowds" principle, allowing participants to contribute to dynamic hierarchies based on collective preferences. The proprietary algorithm aggregates votes by considering factors such as total upvotes, the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, an item's frequency across various rankings, and its specific placement in user-generated re-rankings, which carry additional weight in the computation. Rankings update in as new votes are cast, ensuring that the displayed orders reflect ongoing community input without manual intervention. Complementing the voting system are community-driven features that empower users to actively shape content. Registered users can create personalized re-rankable lists, suggest new items for existing lists, and leave comments to discuss or debate entries, fostering a collaborative environment. While initial lists are often curated by topic experts, the platform's meritocratic structure promotes visibility for popular user contributions, as highly voted or frequently re-ranked items rise in prominence through algorithmic promotion. This user-generated input extends across a variety of list topics, from to . Although an editorial team oversees quality, the core remains community-influenced, with protections like login requirements for re-rankings to prevent unauthorized modifications. To enhance personalization, Ranker offers specialized tools that draw on user interactions for tailored experiences. The Watchworthy app, a free TV recommendation platform, quickly learns individual tastes—typically in about 30 seconds—by prompting users to rate shows, then generates suggestions across over 200 streaming services and networks based on those preferences. This enables users to build custom watchlists and discover content aligned with their viewing habits. Additionally, the platform employs psychographic derived from vote data to power personalized feeds and recommendations, correlating user affinities (e.g., "people who like X also like Y") to deliver relevant content suggestions that deepen engagement. Ranker's user base exceeds 90 million individuals across its core platform and associated apps like Watchworthy, with particularly high interaction levels in pop culture categories such as movies, music, and celebrities, where millions of votes are cast monthly.

Business Model

Revenue Streams

Ranker primarily generates revenue as an advertising-based publisher, integrating display ads, sponsored lists, and into its high-traffic ranking pages to monetize user engagement. These formats include promoted rankings, which function as a "sponsored search" equivalent, enabling brands to claim top positions on contextually relevant lists and thereby reach targeted audiences. Native ads are designed to blend seamlessly with Ranker's content ecosystem, enhancing visibility without disrupting the on pages that attract millions of monthly visitors. The company also pursues consumer partnerships, collaborating with brands to develop custom content such as sponsored polls, branded videos, and promoted rankings tailored to specific categories like or . These collaborations leverage Ranker's crowd-sourced to create interactive experiences, such as reranked lists featuring celebrity input or integrated promotions, driving and direct revenue through sponsorship fees. Advertising revenue growth has been closely linked to surging site traffic, with overall company revenue increasing from $22 million in 2017 to $53.5 million in 2024 as monthly unique visitors expanded significantly. This upward trajectory reflects Ranker's ability to scale ad inventory alongside content volume, including programmatic video and rich media units that have boosted performance metrics like fill rates and CPMs. An additional revenue stream comes from , where links are embedded within lists to earn commissions on user purchases, particularly on affiliated sites like Listverse under Ranker's ownership.

Data and Insights Services

Ranker has transitioned from a consumer-facing crowdsourced to a significant B2B provider via its Ranker Insights , which aggregates over 1.5 billion user votes from 115 million participants to generate actionable intelligence. This evolution positions Ranker as a key supplier of psychographic profiles detailing consumer preferences across sectors, including films, television shows, celebrities, music, and . The 's , derived from volunteered sentiment in rankings, enables precise mapping of behaviors and tastes without relying on third-party cookies or tracking technologies. Ranker Insights delivers psychographic profiles that reveal statistically significant correlations in consumer interests, such as linking preferences for specific TV series to broader tastes in music or . These profiles support applications for brands, agencies, and publishers in targeted by identifying niche segments, optimizing content recommendations, and informing strategic decisions like casting or programming. For instance, studios can use the data to predict fan overlap between projects, while publishers leverage it for enhanced engagement strategies. The underlying user vote data, collected through interactive list , forms the foundation for these insights, ensuring a deterministic and privacy-compliant . Key features of Ranker Insights include machine learning-driven that uncover interconnected preferences and sentiment trends over time, providing both broad-scale overviews and granular, context-specific details. This allows clients to access popularity rankings, fan interest distributions, and behavioral patterns for over 10,000 titles across major streaming services and networks. The platform's intuitive facilitates rapid querying without specialized training, making it accessible for diverse uses. In May 2025, Ranker achieved 100 million total U.S. reach via , enhancing its B2B appeal, and in December 2024, partnered with to integrate insights into media workflows. This B2B focus marks a strategic shift for Ranker, moving beyond ad-supported consumer lists toward high-margin licensing and sales. Self-funded and profitable, Ranker has accelerated this growth by integrating insights into tools like its Watchworthy app, driving direct B2B engagement and expanding its client base among entertainment firms and technology providers.

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