Standards & Accountability
Who is responsible for Most Read News, how the site is funded, 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.
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.
How rankings and reports are produced
- Collection: an automated scraper records articles and their positions on publishers' public “Most Read” or “Most Popular” lists.
- Ranking: Popularity Scores are derived from recorded position and duration data. Human editors and language models do not select or rank articles.
- 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.
- Data errors: [email protected] with the affected URL, a description of the error, and supporting evidence.
- Editorial questions: [email protected].
- Legal and rights-holder requests: [email protected].
- Privacy requests: [email protected].