How rankings work

Everything below is the actual logic the site runs. No hidden weights, no manual overrides.

The pledge

Creators never pay. No listing fee, no premium tier, no boost. Ever.
Rankings are never for sale. Advertisers buy ad slots in the frame around the board. Sponsored listings are labeled and sit outside the numbered list.
There is no admin button that sets a rank. Ranks are computed from the formula below and nothing else.
Vote removals are public. When bot votes are stripped, the count and reason appear on the ledger.

The formula

vsPoints     = (elo − 1500) / 25
statScore    = 0.6·log10(views30d + 1) + 0.3·log10(subscribers + 1) + 0.1·log10(uploads30d + 1)
statPoints   = 10 · statScore / (highest statScore in the vertical)        → 0 to 10
weeklyScore  = votes this week + vsPoints + statPoints
allTimeScore = votes all time  + vsPoints + statPoints
risingScore  = views30d / max(subscribers, 1000)      (only channels with ≥ 1,000 subs)

Boards order by score, then statScore, then creator id.

Your YouTube numbers are worth up to 10 votes. The biggest channel in a vertical starts with all 10, a mid-size channel with 6 or 7, a brand-new one with 3 or 4. So a fresh board is sorted by stats, a handful of real votes moves a small channel past unvoted giants, and once votes exist in any volume the stats are noise. Votes win the long game.

Dormant channels: no upload in 60 days means off the boards and out of Vs mode, no votes accepted, profile still up. The next upload puts them straight back.

Votes

One vote per creator per voter per UTC day. Weekly boards sum Monday to Sunday and reset Monday 00:00 UTC.
Anonymous votes count 1. Signed-in votes will count 2 once sign-in ships.
Per-IP daily caps: 3 votes for the same creator, 100 votes total. Per-voter: 30 votes total.
Cloudflare Turnstile challenges suspicious traffic. Vote-velocity anomalies trigger review and public removal.

Head-to-head (Elo)

In Vs mode you pick one of two creators. Standard Elo, K = 32, everyone starts at 1500. Opponents are matched within 150 Elo when possible so each result carries information. Elo feeds the boards through vsPoints: an Elo of 1600 is worth 4 votes.

Audit it yourself

Every board shows live counts. The public ledger lists votes per creator per day, every removal, and a SHA-256 hash of the week's vote set. Daily hashes will be anchored on-chain. If the counts and the formula don't reproduce the board, we broke the pledge and you can prove it.

Stats

Subscriber, view, and upload data comes from the YouTube Data API and refreshes every few hours. Creators who claim their profile can edit their bio and links but never their numbers.