Standards & Accountability
Who is responsible for Most Read News, how the site is funded, which lists it records, and how its rankings and reports are kept independent.
Last reviewed:
Ownership and responsibility
Most Read News is independently owned and operated by Rene Roost in Estonia. Rene is its founder and operator, data engineer, and the author and editor of its Insights reports. He is accountable for the dataset, the aggregation system, and the original analysis published on this site. See more about the person and story behind this site →
The site has run since .
Most Read News is a news aggregator. It does not author the news articles it ranks. Headlines, bylines, images, and other article metadata remain attributable to their original publishers, and each article links to its source.
Funding and independence
The site is self-funded and currently carries no advertising. It has no sponsors, affiliate relationships, paid placements, commercial publisher partnerships, or other commercial influence. Most Read News does not accept payment to include, exclude, promote, or suppress a publisher or article.
Third-party display advertising may be introduced in the future. If it is, advertising will remain separate from source selection, data collection, categorization, Popularity Scores, rankings, and Insights reports. It will not influence any of them.
Most Read News is not affiliated with the publishers it monitors. A publisher's inclusion, or an article's rank, is not an endorsement by Most Read News; nor does it imply that the publisher endorses this site.
Which lists are recorded
A publication is included only if it shows its readers a public list of the articles they click most, visible to any visitor without a login. The one exception is The New York Times, which publishes its list through its public developer API instead of on its pages. Many news sites show only a selection made by their editors; however well known, those sites are not included.
The lists recorded today carry fourteen different headings. About half are headed “Most Popular” or “Most Read”. The others are headed “Most Viewed”, “Trending”, “Trending Now”, “Trending Stories”, “Popular Now”, “Most Popular News”, “Popular Articles”, “Popular”, “Trending News”, “What's Trending”, “Trending on Deadline” and, on The Sun, “Top Stories”. Each publisher builds its list from its own readers' visits. Most Read News has no access to those counts; it records only which articles a list shows and in what order. Each publisher also sets its own rules, such as how far back its list looks, and doesn't publish them; the Methodology explains what that means for the rankings.
The Sun's heading needs explaining, because on most sites “Top Stories” means a selection made by editors. The Sun doesn't say how its list is built, so its behaviour was checked against the other lists the site records. It is numbered, like most lists ranked by clicks. Its articles change places with each other at nearly every reading, as articles do when their click counts shift; an editor's selection is rarely reshuffled without something new being added. A new article almost never enters at #1: it comes in lower down, and two in three then climb. And the list keeps changing through the British night, when a list kept by editors stays as it was left. On each of these counts it behaves like the BBC's and Sky News's Most Read lists.
How rankings and reports are produced
- Collection: an automated scraper records articles and their positions on the lists described above.
- Ranking: Popularity Scores are derived from recorded position and duration data. Human editors and language models do not decide which articles rank, or how high.
- Categorization: a language model helps categorize and tag articles by subject. It does not score them or decide what is popular.
- Reports: Rene Roost authors and edits the Insights reports from the recorded dataset. Reports distinguish measured findings from interpretation or inference.
The definitions, collection process, reconstruction rules, and known limitations are described in the Methodology. Legal terms, publisher-content handling, and privacy practices are documented in the Terms of Service & Privacy Policy.
Accountability and contact
Rene Roost is the named point of accountability. Material methodology changes are versioned and dated on the Methodology page. Errors in published Insights reports are corrected in place with a dated note. The review process and public material-corrections log are in the Corrections & Data-Error Policy.
- Data errors: contact@mostreadnews.com with the affected URL, a description of the error, and supporting evidence.
- Editorial questions: contact@mostreadnews.com.
- Legal and rights-holder requests: legal@mostreadnews.com.
- Privacy requests: contact@mostreadnews.com.