Flags Make People Click
By Rehan Sayyed, SRT Corporates · Published
A button that adds one to a number is a small thing. Put a flag beside it and something changes. People who would not press a button for themselves will press it for a country.
The cat that started a contest
Popcat began as a meme in October 2020: two pictures of a cat, one with its mouth closed and one edited so that its mouth forms an "O". On 11 December 2020 three students at the University of Sheffield launched a website built on it. Click the cat and its mouth pops open with a sound. Every click also counts toward your nation's rank on a leaderboard.
That last detail turned a toy into a contest. In August 2021 Taiwan became the top nation, and then Thailand overtook it. As of August 2023 the top three were Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand.
Flags on a shared canvas
The same instinct shows up where nobody asked for it. Reddit's r/place gave users a blank canvas and one pixel at a time (see A Short History of the Internet Doing One Thing Together). There was no leaderboard and no mention of countries. Even so, much of the artwork in 2022 was country flags, as it had been in 2017, and many of the early artworks in 2023 were flags again.
What a flag adds
These are our own observations, not research findings.
- A team. One click out of millions is hard to care about. One click for your country is a contribution to something with a name.
- A neighbour. A total only goes up. A rank can be taken away, which gives people a reason to come back.
- A place for small countries. On a table of nations, every country gets a row, however few people live there.
How Click With The World does it
Every click here counts twice: once for the world total and once for a country.
- The country is worked out from your connection. There is no menu to choose from. The details are in How We Know Which Country Clicked Without Storing Your IP.
- The table is ordered by total clicks. Countries with exactly the same total share a rank.
- Each row shows a share. That is the country's clicks as a percentage of all clicks worldwide.
- You can see your own. If your country is detected, the Leaderboard shows its rank and total in a card of its own.
- The Home page shows the top five, and a Live Clicks list names the country of the most recent clicks.
What we left out
A few choices were deliberate.
- No country picker. The table is meant to show where clicks come from, not which flag people would pick. The cost is that someone on a VPN is credited to the country their connection appears to come from.
- No personal scores. There are no usernames and no individual tallies, only countries and the world.
- No prizes. Nothing is won by the country at the top. The rank is the whole reward.
The rule underneath is the same for everyone: one click adds exactly one, to exactly one country, with a short pause before the next.
Two numbers at once
A country table on its own is a contest. A single world total on its own is a shared project. Having both on one page means every click does two things: it moves your flag up, and it moves everyone toward the next milestone. The rivalry is between countries, but the milestones are reached together.
Sources
Both read on 8 October 2026.