Ranker

Ranker

Web address	www.ranker.com

Ranker is a social consumer web platform designed around collaborative and individual list-making and voting. All lists on Ranker are powered by linked datasets to power “connected listmaking” across millions rankable items on different verticals and topics.

Ranker launched in August, 2009, and has since grown to over 20 million unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast.com. As of August 2015, Ranker’s US traffic was ranked at 119.^[1] Ranker also garners significant traffic from the mobile web, ranking 62 in the US on Quantcast.

The site was founded by serial entrepreneur Clark Benson whose previous site, eCrush, sold to Hearst in 2006. Board members include Draper Associates investor Joel Yarmon. Ranker has raised a total of $5.1 million in funding, beginning with a $1 million seed round in 2008 and buffeted by a Series A investment round of $1.3 in April 2011. Other Ranker investors include Draper Associates, Rincon Venture Partners, Siemer Venture Capital and various angels, including Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Ryan Steelberg, and founder Clark Benson himself.^[2] Ranker’s content and data partners include Google-owned Freebase, as well as Factual.

Ranker has many lists that reflect an individual's opinion, but also features "Ultimate Lists" that are determined by a combination of users ranking their version of a given topic, and then allowing individuals to vote positively or negatively on the rank of items on the list. Ranker states that 15% of visitors vote on an average of 10 items per ranking ^[3] Ranker explains that the Ultimate Lists weigh inputs heavier than votes, stating "while every vote counts, your ranked lists count a lot more." Ranker's Ultimate lists have been cited in sources such as Forbes, Motley Fool, and VentureBeat.

Ranker is designed to collect individual user votes and track them, using cookies, across various lists. Per the company's blog,^[4] this allows the company to assemble a taste graph for people who have voted on lists, as opposed to the sort of social graph that sites like Facebook can assemble using their users' personal data. Ranker has also used their taste graph to perform Factor Analysis, a way of looking deeper into user voting trends (for example, the connections between movies that a certain group of people all tagged as "bad.") ^[5]

Notes

^{[6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]}

References

1. "Quantcast.com Score on Ranker.com.".
2. "Ranker – CrunchBase Profile". Retrieved 2012-01-27.
3. "Pando Daily: Crowdsourced Listmaker Ranker Grows By 300% in 18 Months".
4. "data.ranker.com". Retrieved 29 December 2012.
5. "A Deeper Look At The Worst Movies List".
6. "Americas 10 Favorite Fast Food Burgers". May 23, 2015.
7. "Top 10 Restaurant Burgers in America". May 13, 2015.
8. "10 White Lies We All Tell, And Just In Time For National Honesty Day". April 30, 2015.
9. "Top 10 celebs people most want to have a beer with". April 7, 2015.
10. "Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ Replacement: Who Fans Would Choose". March 9, 2015.
11. "It's National Beer Day! Jennifer Lawrence and Bill Murray Are the Most Desirable People to Drink With". April 7, 2015.
12. "Gary Oldman Voted Greatest Actor to Never Win an Oscar". February 20, 2015.
13. "The 25 Funniest SNL Cast Members Of All Time, Ranked". January 24, 2015.
14. "The 25 Funniest People Of All Time". January 20, 2015.
15. "Ranker turns crowdsourced lists into big data". October 8, 2014.
16. "Comcast only 6th worst in customer service, survey says". July 17, 2014.
17. "Ranker rolls out its embeddable widget so you can rank all the things". May 28, 2014.
18. "Even Olympians Can't Help Wheaties Once a King of the Cereal Aisle, the Brand Now Ranks 17th". March 4, 2014.