How we score,
and what money
cannot buy.

The two public numbers

Influence (0–100) is reach that somebody other than you can see: the audience you own, mentions on sites that are not yours, citations from other pages here, and the stages and shows that book you.

Audience reach is your strongest channel, not the average of all of them.If you have a podcast and a small YouTube channel, we score the podcast. Averaging the two would mean starting something new cost you points, and a scoring rule that punishes you for publishing somewhere new is a broken rule. We do not add them together either: the same people follow both, so adding pays you twice for one listener. A channel you do not run neither helps you nor hurts you.

Innovation (0–100) is substance and momentum: work you published, how recent it is (a person’s freshness decays over 180 days, a podcast’s over 60), how complete the page is (capped), awards we could verify, and a signed editorial review worth 30 points.

A third number, 30-day activity, is a change, not a score. It drives the little movement marks and nothing else, and it reads “—” for the first thirty days a page is here. Thirty quiet days are not a verdict on anybody.

Where the measured numbers come from

Three pieces of a score are read off somebody else’s meter rather than worked out here. Here is whose meter, so you can go and look at it yourself.

• Listen Score is Listen Notes’ estimate of how popular a podcast is. We read it off the show’s own page on listennotes.com. We do not work it out and we cannot move it.
• Subscriber counts come from the YouTube Data API, and only for a channel we can tie to the person or to a show they host. A channel we cannot tie to them is left out rather than guessed at, because a count on the wrong page is worse than no count at all.
• Earned links — the count of distinct sites linking to you — comes from DataForSEO’s link index.

Everything else is worked out from what is already published on this site: the credits on a page, the stages, the awards, the dates. Nobody pays to be measured, and no part of how any of it works is a secret.

Where we are missing something, we say so, and we assume the low end.A piece of a score we could not measure is never left blank and it is never a zero. We fill it in a quarter of the way up the scale, which is a deliberately low guess, and the page tells you which pieces were filled in that way. Where we have measured enough people on that piece to know what the real low end looks like, we use theirs instead of the flat guess. If more than 40 percent of either number would be guesswork, we do not publish a number at all. You get Not yet scored, and a list of what is missing.

Rules that protect the index

• Completeness and freshness are capped at 25 points combined. They open the door. They do not win the race.
• Links count once per site, not once per link. Ten links from one place count once, and our own links never count at all.
• Wire releases and sponsored content carry no weight. We took that rule from Forbes.
• Editing your own page is rate-limited and reviewed. Awards get checked again every year.
• An award counts only with an issuing organization, a year, and a link on that organization’s own site. What it is worth comes off a published ladder, and what counts is your highest award, not how many you have listed. A second award of the same standing says the same thing twice.
• An editor can override a number. Every override is logged, and the page says so.
• Minimum-data rule: fewer than three independent sources shows “Not yet scored”, never a low number. A blank is honest. A zero would be a lie.
• Independent means independent of you. Your own website, your own show’s listing, an episode of a show you host — all of it stays on your page, because it happened, and none of it counts toward those three. Nor does one publisher twice: a show is one source however many episodes it ran and however many addresses it posts to. Vouching for yourself is not somebody else vouching for you.
• No self-assessment, ever. There is no quiz, no “rate yourself” field, and no way to hand us your own score. Every number comes from outside data or from an editor who signed their name to it. Somebody scoring themselves is not a measurement.
• Editorial review is signed by a named person, and that name is printed on the page it was signed for. No name means nobody has reviewed it, and we would rather you saw that than assumed otherwise.

The line between money and points

Sponsorship and enhanced profiles buy placement, features, media, and analytics. They never buy points, a rank, or a badge that implies one. If that ever changes, it changes here first, in public, with a dated changelog entry you can hold against us.

Ownership and conflict disclosure

This index is owned by BYND Media. BYND and Beyond Agency sell services that can improve two scored pieces of it: third-party appearances (I3, 20% of Influence) and published work (N2, 25% of Innovation). They sit on two separate 100-point scales, so together they reach 22.5% of a combined score, not 45%. BYND-produced shows get no special treatment and no editorial coverage, and a score and a BYND service never appear on the same page. That is a constraint on us, published so it can be held against us.

Fixing something that is wrong

Every page can be found here and claimed by the person it is about. Claiming never moves a score. Fixing a wrong fact changes what the score is built from, and the next scoring run picks it up. Anyone, owner or not, can file a correction with a source. Every claimed and ranked page also gets a badge, free, forever. We do not sell badges or plaques after selection, and no paid tier will ever include one.

Right of reply. Claim your page and you get 48 hours’ notice before any ranked list you appear on publishes. That notice is not a veto and it does not hold the list. It means nobody here reads about their own placement at the same moment everybody else does. What we do with a page before anyone claims it, and what we never do with it, is on how this works.