Qidian Novel Ranking Explained: How It Actually Works

The Qidian novel ranking people talk about is the monthly vote board, the 月票榜, and the short answer to how it works is money. Readers earn monthly tickets (月票) by paying for chapters, spend them on the books they want to push, and the board sorts novels by tickets received that month. Then the month ends, every unspent ticket expires, and it starts again.

Screenshot: Qidian's 月票榜 (monthly vote ranking), September 2026, captured early in the month

Qidian Novel Ranking: Where the Votes Come From

Qidian's own help page puts it in one line: a monthly ticket is "an important tool for supporting a work," and you get it by spending a certain amount. The detail is in a table sorted by user level, from L1 to L7.

Screenshot: Yuewen/Qidian help center, 月票 (monthly ticket) rules, October 15, 2026

There are four ways in:

1. Base tickets. Spend enough on paid chapters one month and you get a ticket or two on the 1st (and sometimes the 15th) of the next. At L2, a thousand points of chapter purchases last month earns one ticket on the 1st.
2. Subscription tickets. Buy chapters this month and tickets drop as you go. A new L1 reader gets one per 2,500 points, capped at two. Top-level readers get one per 1,000 points, capped at two hundred. That gap is the whole story of who moves the board.
3. Tips. Every 10,000 points in a single tip casts a ticket for that book automatically, with no cap.
4. A trial ticket for new users, once, after the same thousand points of chapter purchases within 30 days and about 15 minutes of reading a day.

Two rules shape everything else. All tickets expire at the end of the month they're issued, so there's no saving them up. And coins you got for free don't earn tickets at all. To cast a base or subscription ticket for a book you also need fan points in it above zero, which in practice means you've already paid for some of it.

Authors get a small, separate stream. Since 2021, a signed, unfinished book unlocks "welfare" tickets when its author keeps updating: 4,000 characters a day unlocks six, up to 186 a month. That's a nudge to post daily, not a way to buy the top spot.

How the Qidian Novel Ranking Moves Through a Month

The board itself says it is ranked by monthly tickets cast on Qidian, and you can watch authors work it. Chapter titles on the September 2026 board carried notes like "（10万月票加更2/5）" (a bonus chapter for every 100,000 tickets, second of five) and, from another author, "last day of double tickets, please vote!" Double-ticket periods exist, and Qidian's rules allow exactly this kind of asking: pinning a request in the comments or rallying a reader group is fine. Alt accounts and bought votes count as rigging.

Some books go further and lock bonus side chapters behind a ticket target. Hit the number, the extra chapter unlocks. It turns the ranking into a group project.

That's also why a single day's count tells you little. Our screenshot above is from early September, with Chen Dong's 夜无疆 (Ye Wu Jiang) on top at just under 24,000 tickets. It did win the month, but on roughly 200,000. And 捞尸人 (Lao Shi Ren), third in that early snapshot, finished 13th. It had posted its final chapter and afterword on August 31.

What It Tells English Readers

The cleanest summary we've seen comes from goodmore233, who says he worked as an editor at one of China's top web novel platforms before joining Wuxiaworld: the monthly ticket ranking "reflects support from paying users." He separates it from the sales ranking, which "reflects a work's actual earnings." Different boards, different questions.

Qidian draws its own conclusion: a book's yearly ticket total is "positively correlated with its IP value." Read that as Qidian telling you which books it sees as franchises. That's why we track it. A novel that sits near the top month after month is the one most likely to get an official English edition or an adaptation, long before it appears on Webnovel. Our Qidian ranking page keeps this month's top 10 with vote counts, and dated snapshots like the mid-September report show how the order moves inside a month.

Need the platform map first: Qidian, Yuewen and Webnovel, and who owns what?

What Is Qidian? Qidian, Yuewen, and WebNovel Explained →

Our Take

Treat the 月票榜 as a heat map of committed, paying readers this month. It's good at spotting what a fanbase is excited about right now and bad at telling you whether a book is good, finished, or right for you. A long-running hit with a huge, loyal base can outvote a better new book for months. We'd use it to find candidates, then check the book itself, and we wouldn't quote a mid-month vote count as if it were final.

For a book that built its English reputation the long way, through readers rather than rankings:

Reverend Insanity Review →

How We Checked This

We read Qidian's help-center pages on monthly tickets and fan points on October 15, 2026, and used our saved copy of the final September 2026 board (October 8) and the r/noveltranslations thread above: 4 pages. Qidian blocks automated visits to the live board, so we didn't quote this month's counts.

Related Reading

• Qidian Comeback Masterpiece Badge: Official Rules Explained
• What Is Xianxia? The Meaning of Cultivation Novels
• Reverend Insanity Review
• Qidian Top Novels This Week (Week 3)
• Qidian AI Generated Novels Crackdown: What It Means
• Qidian Top Novels This Week (Week 2)
• Qidian Top Novels, Week 4: Who Held #5 in September 2026
• Qidian Top Novels This Week: September 2026 Snapshot
• What Is Qidian? Qidian, Yuewen, and WebNovel Explained

References

[1] Qidian help center: 月票 (monthly tickets) [2] Qidian help center: 书友值 (fan points) [3] Qidian: 月票榜, September 2026 [4] r/noveltranslations: How a Chinese web novel actually gets produced