How PULSE counts

PULSE watches Whatnot from the outside, the way any viewer can: it looks at public live shows. It never logs in to Whatnot and never touches anyone’s account. This page is how the numbers on this site are made, and what they can’t tell you.

How we count shows

About once an hour, PULSE goes through every Whatnot category it tracks and counts the people watching each live show listed there. In a typical hour that reaches about 99% of the listed shows. Each count is a snapshot of that moment.

In the 15 days to Oct 14, 2026, PULSE counted every category it tracks 350 times, about once an hour: 1,235,275 counts of live shows from 133,900 different sellers.

Your own shop

When you link your @handle to a PULSE account, PULSE also checks your own show about every 2 minutes while you are live. That catches your real peak more closely than an hourly count. Those readings show in your account, your recap emails and the show recap page you can share.

What the numbers mean

Peak viewers: the most people PULSE counted watching one show.
Usual crowd, or average viewers: the average of our counts while a show was live.
Viewer-minutes: each count multiplied by the minutes until the next one, added up over the show. A long gap between counts is capped so it can’t inflate the total.
Minutes on air: from when the show began (the start time Whatnot published, or our first sighting if that came earlier) to the last time we saw it live. The show ran on past that, so it is at least that long.
Best hour: the hour of the day when a category’s typical show, or its total audience, is biggest. Times show in your own time zone.
Open viewers: people watching a category outside its 3 biggest shows. Per show, that number is split evenly across the other shows live in the category.

These measure different things, so dividing one by another does not give a third. Viewer-minutes divided by minutes on air is not the average, for example, because the two cover different stretches of the show.

What “early read” means

PULSE names a best hour, or a best day and hour, only after it has counted that slot at least 3 times. Until it has counted it 6 times, the answer is marked early read: our best guess so far, and it can still move. A day-and-hour slot is named only once every day and hour of the week has been counted 3 times. When PULSE doesn’t have enough yet, the page says so and names no answer.

What PULSE can’t see

Sales, prices, buyers and anything inside a seller’s account. PULSE sees what any viewer sees: live shows and how many people are watching.
A show that starts and ends between two counts, or runs in a category PULSE doesn’t track. Those shows are missing from our numbers, which says nothing about how they did.
The exact number at every moment. A count is taken at one moment, so it can sit a little off the number Whatnot shows a minute later.

Every number here is PULSE’s own count of public pages, and none of it is an official Whatnot figure. PULSE is independent and not affiliated with Whatnot.

The show recap

A recap is one show in four numbers: peak viewers, average viewers, viewer-minutes and minutes on air. For a linked shop it uses the 2-minute reads; otherwise it uses the hourly counts. If PULSE saw a show on air but never caught a viewer count, the recap shows no peak rather than a 0.

Minutes on air is a different measure from the other three. It runs from where the show began (the start time Whatnot published, or PULSE’s first sighting if that came earlier) to the last count that caught it live, so the show was on air at least that long. A stretch where the show was missing from the list is left out only when a count that counted the whole category to the bottom ran during it and did not find the show. Where PULSE only saw the top of the category, the stretch is counted, because not finding a show there is not the same as the room being off air. On the rare show whose published start is so far back that the session would run past a day, PULSE does not use that start and counts only the stretch between its own sightings.

The long version, for anyone quoting PULSE numbers, is how PULSE counts Whatnot viewers.