How PULSE counts Whatnot viewers

Every viewer count on PULSE is read from the feed, not estimated, and this page is the full account of how. If you are going to quote a PULSE figure, this is what it does and does not mean.

The sweep, about once an hour

PULSE reads Whatnot's public live category feeds on a timer, about once an hour, around the clock. Each pass is a sweep: it walks the lanes PULSE tracks, records the live rooms those feeds list, and stores the viewer count each room is showing at that instant. Nothing here logs into Whatnot and nothing reads a private page; it is the same public feed a buyer browsing categories sees.

What a live sample is, and what it is not

A live sample is one sweep's reading of one lane: the rooms that lane's feed listed as live at that moment, and the viewers each was showing. It IS a real, timestamped count read from a public feed. It is NOT the whole of Whatnot, it is NOT registered users, and it is NOT sales or revenue. Viewers are the clearest audience signal Whatnot puts on the live feed, so that is what PULSE counts, and it is always tied to the minute it was read.

Coverage, and where it leaks

In a typical sweep PULSE captures about 99% of the rooms a lane's feed lists live, so a lane's reading is close to what its feed showed at that instant. The gap is real and worth naming: a room that starts after a sweep, or ends before the next one, can go uncounted, because PULSE only ever sees a lane at the moments it sweeps it. Between two sweeps it is not watching, so short rooms and quick spikes can slip through. If the full-lane collector is ever down, a standby reads only the roughly two dozen busiest rooms Whatnot lists per category page, and every page says so plainly until the full sweep returns. That is why every live figure is written as a snapshot of a moment, not a running tally.

Only the lanes PULSE tracks

PULSE counts the lanes it tracks and no others. A lane outside that set is in no total, no ranking and no lane page, and its absence never means an empty lane, it means PULSE was not measuring it. The tracked set is the same list the sitemap advertises and /live links, so what is counted is exactly what is reachable.

How long the readings are kept

History comes at two resolutions, and they are not interchangeable. The most recent 14 days are kept sweep by sweep, the raw readings themselves. Older than that, the sweeps are compacted into rollups (one row per lane per hour, one per seller per day) and the individual sweeps are deleted. The rollups are kept for the long term, so the archive reaches back further than 14 days, but outside that window it is an hourly or daily aggregate rather than the sweeps themselves.

Observations, not official figures

Everything PULSE publishes is its own observation of Whatnot's public feeds, read at a point in time. It is close to what those feeds reported, but it is PULSE's count, not an official Whatnot figure, and PULSE is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Whatnot. Depth-gated reads like a lane's best hour and its 24-hour shape appear once enough sweeps have banked at each hour; until then the lane page says so plainly rather than naming an hour it cannot yet stand behind.

Want to see it in action? Open any lane PULSE tracks for its live read, the live category rankings for the busiest lanes right now, or Whatnot statistics for the market's measured numbers over time.

FAQ