Where our numbers come from

VYRL is play money

VYRL cannot be bought, cannot be transferred between people, and cannot be turned back into money. There is no purchase anywhere in the product, and no way to take value out of it. It is a scoreboard.

Where a number comes from

For each post we use the best access we have, in this order. Whichever one we end up using is fixed before the market opens, is named on the market page, and never changes afterwards.

1. First choice

   The platform's own public API

   Official, documented access to public counts. YouTube today; Instagram for professional accounts as approval lands.

2. Second choice

   The creator connects their own account

   A creator who links their account gives us their first-party numbers, which are the most accurate available. It is entirely optional, and reversible at any time.

3. Last resort

   A third-party data provider

   Only where no official access exists — TikTok publishes none for this — and only for what a logged-out visitor can already see. We never store the media itself, only a link and a thumbnail.

How often we look

We read a post more often as its market gets closer to closing, and hardly at all before that. The schedule is published so nobody gains an edge by guessing it, and every reading on it is deliberately offset by a random amount so nobody can predict when the next one lands.

Every interval above varies by up to a quarter, at random.

Posts we read through YouTube’s own API are checked at least every two minutes while a market is open on them. For every source, the schedule above is the slowest we will ever look.

The last reading is taken in the final minute before the cutoff, on purpose and not at random. A market asks about a number at a moment, so that is the moment we read — and it means nobody can know the answer while the market is still open.

If you made the post

We create markets about public posts without asking their creators first, and we know that is worth being straightforward about. Two things you can do:

• · Connect your account, and your own numbers become the ones we use for markets about your work.
• · Or ask us to stop. A person checks the request first — a form anyone could fill in for anyone else would protect nobody — and once we have confirmed it we act within 24 hours: your posts come out of the product, any open market about them is cancelled with everyone getting back exactly what they put in, and no new market can be created about your work.
• · Changed your mind later? Ask us the same way and we will put your work back in scope.

What we store

A link, a thumbnail, the author handle, the publication time, and the counts we read over time. We never re-host the video or the image; when a post is shown it is shown through the platform’s own embed.

When something changes

If a post is deleted or made private before a market closes, the market is cancelled and every position is refunded at the last odds, never above what it cost. If we are the ones who cancel — bad terms, a data source we lose, or a creator asking us to stop — everyone gets back exactly what they put in instead. The difference is deliberate: paying everyone in full when a post disappears would let anyone who can make a post disappear bet without risk.