Ranking the future: How Clark Benson turned a nerdy habit into a digital dynasty
In the sprawling, sun-bleached expanse of Los Angeles, where dreams are as plentiful as palm trees and just as likely to topple in a stiff breeze, Clark Benson sits at the helm of Ranker, a digital media company that has quietly become a titan of crowd-sourced opinion. It’s a platform that thrives on a simple, almost primal impulse: people love to rank things. From the best horror movies to the most overrated tourist traps, Ranker’s lists — vetted and voted on by millions of users — offer a type of democratic clarity in an age drowning in subjective noise.
Benson, a serial entrepreneur with a mop of dark hair and a restless energy that suggests he’s always chasing the next idea, has built a career on turning personal obsessions into profitable ventures. However, as he recounted in a recent interview with CEO.com, his journey is less a straight line than a series of calculated detours through the wreckage of the dot-com boom, the rise of social media, and now the murky waters of artificial intelligence.
Benson’s story begins, as many entrepreneurial tales do, with youthful restlessness. Growing up in the Midwest, he was the type of kid who made lists — albums of the year, concerts he’d attended — long before the internet amplified such compulsions. “I’ve always been a list nerd,” he says, his voice echoing the faintest hint of self-deprecation. This trait stayed with him throughout his college years at the University of Illinois, where he studied finance, and into his early career, which included a position at Virgin Records in the nineties. There, he had a front-row view of the music industry’s pre-digital swagger — grunge reigned supreme, CDs were treasures, and the concept of streaming seemed like science fiction. Yet even then, Benson was looking ahead, sensing the seismic shifts that would soon transform the world he knew.
His first major breakthrough came with eCrush, a proto-social network launched in 1999, just as the dot-com bubble was inflating to its delirious peak. Targeted at teens and young adults, eCrush allowed users to send anonymous flirtations to their crushes, revealing identities only if feelings were mutual. It was a clever take on the awkwardness of youth, and it caught on — big time. By 2006, Hearst Corporation acquired it, giving Benson his first taste of a lucrative exit. “It was a wild ride,” he recalls, “but it taught me that you don’t need a billion users to create something valuable. You just need the right ones.” The sale was a triumph, but it also left him at a crossroads. The internet was changing — MySpace was giving way to Facebook, and the era of scrappy startups was evolving into something slicker and more corporate. Benson, however, wasn’t ready to cash out and call it a day.
Instead, he doubled down on his entrepreneurial spirit, exploring music marketing with Almighty Music Marketing and even co-owning a record store in Redondo Beach called Off/Beat Music. (It closed in 2001, a victim of the Napster era.) However, it was Ranker, launched in 2009, that would become his crowning achievement. The concept was deceptively simple: take the “wisdom of crowds”—a phrase Benson shares with the reverence of a mantra—and apply it to every imaginable topic. Want to know the best Rolling Stones album? Ranker has a list, voted on by thousands. Curious about the worst airline food? There’s a list for that, too. “I wanted to create something that didn’t depend on one expert’s opinion,” he explains. “The crowd, over time, gets it right.”
Getting Ranker off the ground was no easy task. The early days were tough — Benson bootstrapped the company with his own funds, dedicating nights to mastering search engine optimization since there was no marketing budget. "I’d work all day, then go home and study SEO until 2 a.m.,” he says. “It was brutal, but it worked.” Gradually, the site gained traction, its lists appearing in Google searches like digital breadcrumbs. By 2011, Ranker was attracting millions of unique visitors each month, enough to lure venture capital and a growing staff now numbering in the dozens. Today, it ranks among the top fifty websites in the U.S., according to Quantcast, an impressive achievement considering its niche: no cat videos, no breaking news, just lists.
Benson’s talent for identifying trends has kept Ranker relevant as the internet has evolved. He anticipated the rise of the influencer economy — “People trust voices they relate to, not faceless brands,” he observes — and shifted Ranker to take advantage of it, partnering with creators to extend its reach. Now, he’s focusing on AI, a technology he regards with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. “It’s going to change everything,” he says, “but it’s also going to inundate the web with low-quality content. Our advantage is human-validated data — real people voting, not bots generating answers.” It’s a bold assertion, but Ranker’s statistics support it: the site records tens of millions of votes each year, showcasing its retention in an age of short attention spans.
Despite his success, Benson remains a man in motion, perpetually unsatisfied. “Ranker’s doing great — traffic’s up, revenue’s up — but I still feel like we’re only halfway there,” he admits. He dreams of spinning off new ventures from Ranker’s wealth of opinion data — perhaps a predictive analytics tool or a consumer insights platform. At home, he’s a husband to Jenifer and a father to twins Austin and Zani, but his downtime is limited. A music enthusiast, he’s seen over a hundred bands perform in a single year — twice — chasing the thrill of live shows from Phish to Radiohead. “It’s my reset button,” he says.
In a way, Benson embodies the paradox of the modern entrepreneur: a dreamer anchored by pragmatism, a listmaker who flourishes in chaos. Ranker may not possess the cultural cachet of TikTok or the gravitas of the New York Times, but it has carved out a distinctive, enduring space in the digital realm. As the internet progresses toward its next transformation, Benson is already planning his next move—because, for him, the list is never complete.