A story on rankings

Rankings are very important in any part of our lives! We rank countries for their wealth, inhabitants or medals won at Olympic games and any other sport competition. We rank newspapers, TV stations and website by readers/viewers. We rank companies by turnover and market cap. We rank airlines and airports by punctuality. We rank wine, restaurants, cars, schools, universities, books, blogs, songs, and so forth.

Why do we rank everything? The reason certainly is our approach to order and compare to help understand the connex of complex issues. This is a human attitude we have to accept and not comment on. Having to live with this we should at least question the basis of a published ranking: who is doing it for what reason and and what is the methode of evaluation. Of course any reliable ranking has to include all relevant players and disclose the assessment criterias.

If it comes to annual reporting there are a lot of rankings being published worldwide. Producers of annual reports need to reason and measure their work to justify their budgets. Perfect incredients for intransparency and dilettantism. Worst for me are those rankings that take an entry fee to rank reports. Big agencies not only get high discounts for multiple entries, their reports are also ranked significantly higher, as they account for the big money! He who pays the piper calls the tune. And to add injury to insult these rankings are not covering all published annual reports. As a result I would deeply question all paid-rankings.

See below a list of rankings with links and additional information. I hope this helps to rank the rankings!
Comments on rankings that I forgot are more than welcome.

Overview on Annual Report Rankings
Issuer	Entry fee	Method published	Print or Online	Complete coverage of
Radley Yeldar	No	Yes	Print & Online	FTSE 100
Nexxar	No	Yes	Online	FTSE 100, DAX, AEX, E-Stoxx, Dow, ATX, SMI
Smiths & FT	No	No	Online	FTSE 100
Manager Magazin	No	Yes	Print	DAX, Stoxx
Bilanz	No	No	Print	SMI
e.com	No	Yes	Print	Selected companies
UK IR Society	Yes	Yes	Print & Online	Selected companies
ARC Awards	Yes	No	Print & Online	Selected companies
LACP Competition	Yes	No	Print	Selected companies
IR Global Rankings	Yes	No	Online	Selected companies

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