Ranker

History

Ranker launched in August 2009, and has since grown to over 20 million unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast.com. Benson’s idea came from the reviews on sites like Amazon, but there were so many that it took too much time to go through them. As of August 2015, Ranker’s US traffic was ranked at 119. A Quantcast Top 50 site, Ranker attracts more than 20 million monthly unique visitors. As a result, Ranker has one of the largest databases of opinions with more than 250 million votes gathered on over one million items.

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. Ranker’s content and data partners include Google-owned Freebase, as well as Factual. In 2016,Ranker’s audience has grown by more than 40% catapulting it to one of the most engaged publishers on the web with one of the highest time spent on site and pages per visit. With more than 20 million monthly U.S. unique visitors (comScore), Ranker is now pacing ahead of leading publishers. Investors have given Ranker $7.5 million, including Benson’s initial stake. Other investors are Draper Associates, TenOneTen Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners and Lowercase Capital.

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. If there’s a topic on the web, there’s a high probability that a group of people feels passionate about it. And in today’s connected environment, they’re going to share their thoughts and make their voices heard.Ranker states that 15% of visitors vote on an average of 10 items per ranking 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’s popularity comes mostly from the entertainment world. Top movies, television shows, stars and athletes dominate the home page. If you want to know the top movies on the Olympics or the best USA original network series, Ranker is the place to go.

Ranker is designed to collect individual user votes and track them, using cookies, across various lists. Per the company's blog, 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.")