ReaderFunded · method
The rules behind the top list and the category pages. Measured, not voted: nothing on the list was submitted, nominated or paid for.
A site is on the list when real people fund it directly - a membership, a paid subscription, a recurring donation - through a page on Patreon, Steady, Tipeee, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Liberapay, SubscribeStar, GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective or Substack. Advertising, grants, sponsors and shops do not count; they are other people's money.
A funding page is credited to a site only when the claim runs in both directions: the site links to the page, and the page names the site back. A Patreon that mentions a site it likes is not evidence. A site pasting someone else's donation link is not evidence. Both together are.
A free-software project keeps its funding in its repository as a rule, and its site links the repository, not the profiles. Since 1 November 2026 that counts as the site's own link when the repository points back: a page of the site links a GitHub repository whose homepage field names the site, and the funding links in that repository's FUNDING.yml and README are the site's forward evidence (the explain page says github-repo:owner/name). A site linking someone else's repository gets nothing from it. The crypto addresses such a README carries are recorded for the site under the rule below.
Naming the site back means its address on the page or, since 1 November 2026, its name: a profile named after the site (patreon.com/thewhitepube for thewhitepube.com), or one that says the name in words ("my site ResearchBuzz" for researchbuzz.me). The name must be six characters or more and not an ordinary word - a name that occurs on thousands of pages of the index is refused, so a site called science.org is never matched by a profile that says "science". What this cannot tell apart is a fan site named after a creator and linking the creator's real page; if you find one, name it.
Where a platform cannot name a site back the rule is stricter, not looser: a Substack counts for the custom domain it is served from, or for its own substack.com address when it has none, and a crypto address only for the one site that publishes it, when no other site claims it and its history looks like donations.
Every pair is re-checked monthly. A pair whose evidence has gone fades out over ninety days rather than vanishing, and comes back in full if the evidence returns. A pair found to be gaming is revoked by hand and stays out.
Each site's weight is built from two terms, the paying count and the yearly revenue, each taken as a logarithm so that ten times the money adds a constant rather than multiplying the score. Each term is divided by its average over all funded sites and the two are blended three to one, payers over revenue. A site missing one term is treated as average on it, never punished for publishing less, and never rewarded twice for the term it has.
Estimated evidence enters discounted: revenue inferred from a supporter count at half strength, a Substack's bracket ("thousands of paid subscribers") as the bracket's typical publication at half strength. A site verified on a platform that publishes no amounts at all gets a flat floor, about one percent of a typical quantified site: enough to say funded, too little to climb on.
Each site carries a tier for how well its paying count is known: A, the platform publishes the number of people paying now; B, the number is estimated, from lifetime supporters, a bracket or engagement, or is the publisher's own published figure where the platform publishes none (named self-declared); C, no count at all. Where this site counts funded sites - the line on the home page, the category counts, the platform table - it counts tiers A and B only. Tier C sites stay searchable and on the list, at the floor weight.
No one can buy a place. Adding evidence can only raise a site; the only way up is more readers paying. Every constant the weight depends on is recorded with the run, and any site's weight can be rebuilt from its own evidence, line by line; write to dispute one.
The rank is recomputed once a month, after the funding pages have been re-read; the date on the list is that run's. New sites arrive as the crawl finds their funding links, which follows Common Crawl's cadence, so a site funded last week appears when the next crawl is worked.