Every list of the best places in London is paid for
Ours just tells you the price. It is printed next to the rank, the log of who paid what is public, and nobody here can move a venue up for any reason other than money that everyone can see.
The argument
A guide to the best bars in London is either written by somebody with taste and no budget, or it is an advertising product pretending to be a guide. The second one is far more common, and you can usually tell, which is the part that does the damage: you stop believing any of it.
So we took the hidden thing and made it the whole mechanism. A venue pays to hold a rank. What it paid is printed beside it. Anybody can pay more and take the rank off them, at a price that is published before they click. There is no editorial tier to buy your way into and no relationship that gets you a better position.
That is not a claim about taste. A board like this tells you which venues believe hard enough in their own room to put money on being seen. It is a different signal from a critic, and it is a more honest one than a guide that took the money and did not say so.
What we sell, and what we do not
We sell a rank
One payment, held until somebody pays more. Nothing recurring, nothing that expires, no balance that can quietly run out and cost a venue a position it already paid for.
We take no commission
Not on a booking, not on a bill, not on a return visit. What happens between a venue and a visitor after the door is nothing to do with us.
We count doors, not clicks
A visit is a code redeemed by staff at the venue. A click is cheap to cause and proves nothing, so we do not price anything on it.
We take no side
One operator, no listings of our own, no stake in any venue on the board. If we ever have one, it will say so on the listing.
Who this is for
If you are going out, the board tells you who is trying hardest to get you through the door tonight, and usually hands you something for turning up. Read the price next to a venue as what it thinks your visit is worth. That is useful information, and no other guide gives it to you.
If you run a venue, this is the only advertising we know of where you can see what the person above you paid, work out what beating them costs, and check afterwards what it returned in people who actually walked in. Everything on the analytics page is worked out from the same public log you can read yourself.