How Qidian's Rankings Work: Monthly Votes and Tickets Explained

月票 is not a like button. Knowing what each board counts is the difference between finding a good book and finding a well-marketed one.

Explainer 8 July 2026 5 min read

Qidian does not have "a" ranking. It has twelve boards, each sliced across fourteen categories, each measuring a different reader behaviour. To an English reader they all look like a top-100 list, so most people default to whichever one loads first and assume it is the popularity chart.

It usually is not. Here is what each board counts, what it costs the reader to affect it, and therefore what it is evidence of.

The reader currencies

Qidian runs a small economy. Four things a reader can spend, and each drives a different board.

月票 · Monthly votes

The most meaningful number on the platform.

Monthly votes are earned by spending money. Readers accrue them by buying chapters and holding a subscription, they reset every month, and each one is cast at a single book. Because the supply is capped by spending and the clock resets, a reader who gives a book their votes is making a real allocation decision every month.

That is why the monthly vote board is the closest thing to a canonical ranking. It is expensive to influence, it cannot be inflated by traffic, and it re-measures from zero monthly, so a book on it is popular now, not in 2019.

It also drives author income directly, which is why monthly-vote campaigns are a real feature of Chinese fandom, with authors openly asking for votes at the end of chapters. Coordinated pushes do happen. It is still the hardest board to game, because the underlying currency has to be bought.

收藏 · Collections

The library add. A bookmark, not a rating.

A reader adds a book to their shelf to keep reading it. The collections board is a cumulative count, which means it favours books that have existed longer and rewards a strong opening above all else, because most collections happen in the first few chapters.

Collections are the metric authors watch during a launch. As a reader, treat a high collection count as "a lot of people started this", which is not the same as "a lot of people finished it".

There is also a VIP collections board counting shelf adds only among paid chapters, which is a much stronger signal: those readers had already paid before they committed.

打赏 and fan levels

Direct rewards to the author, and the tiered fan status that spending buys. This surfaces as the fan count on a book page and drives the reader buzz board, which measures community activity around a book: an engaged, noisy fandom rather than raw readership.

The other boards

Beyond the four main currencies:

Bestsellers 畅销榜 ranks by actual paid subscription revenue. It is the purest commercial ranking on the platform, and the most brutal.
Reading Index 阅读指数榜 is Qidian's own composite score. It blends several signals by an undisclosed formula, which makes it a decent general-purpose board and a bad one to reason about.
Most Updated 更新榜 ranks by recent chapter output. Useful for one specific thing: finding books that are actively, reliably updating rather than quietly abandoned.
The new-book boards are separated by author status, which is a distinction the platform cares about a great deal: public authors, signed authors, newly signed, and debut authors. If you want to catch something before it is big, these are where it will be.

Every board is also sliced by category

This is the part most people miss, and it is where the rankings become genuinely useful.

A book that is 40th overall might be 3rd in its own category, and in a catalogue this size the category board is the one that tells you something. Qidian publishes fourteen channels, and each pairs with each board:

Plus Realistic Fiction, Military and Sports.

Which board should you actually use

If you want one board and no thinking: monthly votes, in your category. Money-backed, resets monthly, sliced to a genre you care about. It is the single best list on the platform.

If you want durability rather than heat: collections, or VIP collections. Cumulative counts favour books that have been good for a long time.

If you want to find something early: the debut-author boards. Small readerships, and the ranking is doing genuine work because nothing there has momentum yet.

If you want something that is definitely still updating: Most Updated. The single most common complaint about starting a web novel is picking one that stopped.

Reading a ranking honestly

Three cautions worth carrying:

Cumulative and periodic boards are different animals. Monthly votes reset. Collections do not. A book high on collections and absent from monthly votes was big once. A book high on both is big now.

Position movement says more than position. A book that climbed forty places this week is a story; a book sitting at 15 for two years is furniture. The rankings here show movement against the previous snapshot for exactly that reason.

A board is not a quality rating. Every one of these measures a behaviour: spending, clicking, bookmarking, arguing in the comments. None of them measures whether the prose is good. The score on a book page, with its rating count, is closer, and it is still a popularity-weighted average from a self-selected audience.

And on Fanqie

Fanqie's boards work nothing like this, because Fanqie has no currency to spend: reading is free, so the only thing to count is reads. Its Most Read board is the direct equivalent and the only one with a real category dimension. There is a fuller comparison of the two platforms here.

Once you know what the boards mean, the more precise tool is usually the catalogue rather than a chart: browse Qidian and sort by the metric you now know you want.

The reader currencies

月票 · Monthly votes

推荐票 · Recommendation tickets