How World Crown works
Every rule the product actually runs on, in the order you meet them.
World Crown in 60 seconds
- Every week you get one country vote. It is free and it needs no account.
- Weekly votes reset on Monday at 00:00 UTC. All-time totals never reset.
- Each of the 195 countries also has one Crown, which somebody can own. Its owner is that country's King.
- A Crown is taken by paying more than it is currently worth. Voting can never take one and never loses one.
- When a season closes, the Kings of the top ten countries earn Reward Credit toward more Crowns.
One vote per person per week, for one country. A spent vote never restricts where you can go: every other country stays open, explorable and shareable, and you can still take any Crown.
Voting needs no account. Your vote is tied to a random token in a cookie, and the database only ever stores a one-way, season-scoped hash of it.
A season runs from Monday 00:00 UTC to the following Monday 00:00 UTC. Closing a season archives its results, opens the next one and returns your vote. No vote is ever deleted, and no Crown is ever touched by a rollover.
Your vote returns when the next season opens on Monday at 00:00 UTC.
195 countries compete: the 193 UN member states plus Palestine and the Holy See. There is one leaderboard, and there is nothing underneath it.
Countries on the same total share a rank. The order between them is decided the same way every time, for every visitor, and the reward resolver pays in exactly that order.
When a season closes, the King of each of the top ten countries earns Reward Credit. The reward follows the Crown and not the votes: it goes to whoever holds that Crown at the close, not to the people who voted for it.
Weekly country rewards
The top 10 countries pay their Kings Reward Credit when the season closes. At most $250 is issued in a week.
- 1
- $100
- 2
- $50
- 3
- $30
- 4 to 10
- $10 each
World Crown issues at most $250 of Reward Credit in a week.
A Crown taken after the season closed belongs to its new King, and the week that ended belongs to the old one.
A place with no King at the close earns nothing. The credit is not carried over and is not passed down the table.
Nothing is rolled over. Unpaid Reward Credit is not carried into the following week and is not added to another place.
Reward Credit is promotional credit for taking Crowns. It is not cash, it cannot be withdrawn and it cannot be sent to anyone.
There is exactly one World Billboard, and it is advertising space rather than a Crown. It sits on the home page between the globe and the weekly ranking, and whoever holds it appears there until somebody pays more for it.
The Billboard has nothing to do with the competition. It is not won, it has no country, it takes no votes, it holds no rank, it is not affected by a season, and it earns no Reward Credit.
An empty Billboard costs $1. A held one costs its current value plus one dollar. You may offer more, and whatever you actually pay becomes the Billboard's new value.
A Billboard tenure has no end date. There is no weekly reset, no auction timer and no expiry: the advertiser stays until a higher qualifying payment settles.
The Billboard is paid for with external money only. Welcome Credit, Reward Credit and Crown Balance are part of the Crown economy and cannot be used for it.
The Billboard changes hands only after the payment provider confirms the payment on our own server. If somebody else takes it while you are paying, your payment does not overwrite their tenure: the order is refused with a reason recorded against it.
There are exactly 195 Crowns, one for each competition country. A Crown does not expire, does not reset with a season, and cannot be won or lost by voting. A reign ends only when somebody pays more for it.
A King appears on the place card, in the ranking and on the map. Visiting a King goes through a World Crown redirect, which is how a King's clicks are counted honestly.
An unclaimed Crown costs $1. A Crown worth $8 costs $9 to take. You may offer more, and whatever you actually pay becomes the Crown's new value, so a higher offer buys a higher wall behind you.
The Crown value is always the full amount of the acquisition. Credit and balance are ways of paying, never discounts, so a $20 Crown paid partly with credit is still worth $20.
A one-time $1 credit for a new account, applied to any Crown at any price. It is promotional credit: it cannot be withdrawn, cannot be sent to anyone and has no cash value.
Earned by holding a Crown that finishes a season in a reward place. Like Welcome Credit it is promotional: it can be spent on a Crown and on nothing else, it cannot be withdrawn and it cannot be transferred. It never expires and there is no cap on how much of a purchase it may cover.
Reward Credit is promotional credit for taking Crowns. It is not cash, it cannot be withdrawn and it cannot be sent to anyone.
Money you have paid in, held for Crown purchases inside World Crown. Direct Pay never spends it: it is used only when you choose to use it. It is not a bank account, it pays no interest and it is not a general-purpose store of value.
A Crown changes hands only after the payment provider confirms the payment on our own server. Returning from a checkout screen is not proof of ownership and never grants a Crown on its own.
If somebody else takes the Crown while you are paying, your payment does not overwrite their reign. The order is refused with a reason recorded against it, and it is reconciled from that record.
A King placement carries a name, a destination link, an image and an optional line of description. The placement belongs to the Crown rather than to the account, so one person can hold one country as a game and another as something else entirely.
Fetch Details reads the public metadata of a link you supply and fills the form in for you. It is a convenience, not a verification: nothing is published until you have looked at it and confirmed it.
An advertiser sees counts, never people. Impressions, viewable impressions, opens, clicks, unique clicks and a coarse breakdown by source, device and country. No visitor address, profile or identifier is ever shown to an advertiser or kept beyond a day.
Crown analytics and World Billboard analytics are separate records. A reign's numbers belong to that reign and a Billboard tenure's numbers belong to that tenure, and neither is ever merged into the other.
A viewable impression is at least half the placement visible for at least one second. This is World Crown's own measure and is not an audited industry metric.
A store click is a click. World Crown has no attribution relationship with either app store and never reports installs or downloads.
A placement is reviewed before it appears publicly. Until it has been, the Crown is shown as held and the artwork and link are not shown at all. Ownership and public approval are separate: a placement waiting for review is still a real reign.
Changing a placement's link, image or name sends it back for review. It never ends a reign and never changes what the Crown is worth.
One vote per person per week is enforced by the database, not only by the interface. Requests are rate limited and challenged, and obviously automated traffic is excluded from an advertiser's qualified counts.
World Crown uses published geographic data and does not draw its own. The hierarchy is the world and then 195 countries, and it stops there: nothing below a country competes.
Boundaries are drawn for visualization. They do not imply a position on any territorial question.
No raw network address is stored anywhere, for any purpose. Voter identity is a one-way hash that changes every season, so the same visitor cannot be followed from one week to the next. Analytics identifiers rotate daily and cannot be joined to anything else.
Analytics are aggregate. No individual visitor, address or profile is ever shown to an advertiser.
Reign history is append-only. Taking a Crown closes the previous reign and opens a new one at the same instant, so a Crown's record has neither a gap nor an overlap and no past King is erased.
This environment is not connected to a payment provider, so nothing can currently be bought here. Everything on this page describes the rules the product runs on.
Map boundaries are shown for visualization purposes and do not imply any political position.