How MyCountry works
Crown bidding is closed. Voting is still free and still counts. The crowns already taken stay on their countries, and the rules below are the ones they were bought under.
Voting is free
Every country on the planet starts at zero. Pick one on the spinning globe or in the list and vote. You get one free vote per day, refreshed 24 hours after you use it. No account, no email.
We recognise a returning voter from a salted fingerprint of the connection, not from a stored identity: enough to enforce the daily limit, not enough to identify anyone.
The crown
One board, every country on Earth. The question is the oldest argument on the internet, settled one free vote at a time.
Crowns are bought, one country at a time
The vote ranking is earned. The crown is bought — and it is per country: every one of the 194 countries has its own auction, and every one of them starts at the same price: $2. We do not decide which country is worth more — bidding does. Crowning a country puts a badge over it on the globe with your logo, your name and your message, plus a link that scrolls in the ticker on the front page.
The next bid on a country is always 1.5× the current amount, and never below that country’s starting price. Countries are independent: someone paying $200 for one country does not change what any other country costs.
Bids are final and non-refundable. If someone bids higher, the crown moves to them and your bid stays in the public bid history on that country’s page. Nothing about bidding touches the vote ranking — buying a crown never adds a single vote, and the ranking is decided by votes alone.
One exception to “final”: if the amount actually paid is below the minimum (the payment page lets you edit it), the bid takes nothing and is refunded automatically.
Every click your link receives is counted and shown publicly on the country page, so the next bidder can see what the spot is worth.
Two banners belong to nobody’s country
A crown ties you to one country, and not every advertiser wants that. So there are exactly two more places on this site: the left and right banners. They carry no flag and no country — they sit in the rails of every page, for every visitor, wherever they are from.
Same auction, different floor: a free banner starts at $10 and the next bid is 1.5× the current one. Bids are final in exactly the same way, and each banner shows its own public click counter, so the next bidder can see what the spot returned.
Every number here is real
The site launched with a batch of starting votes so that no board began at zero. They are gone. Every vote, visitor, live counter and crown you see now comes from a real person — nothing is seeded, padded or placed by us. That means the numbers are small while the site is young, and we would rather show you a small true number than a large invented one.
Is this serious?
No. It measures enthusiasm and nothing else. It is not an index of quality of life, safety, economy or anything a real institution would publish. It exists so people can argue about their homelands in public and share the scoreboard.