A leaderboard for cities

A contribution buys your city a position on a public leaderboard, plus an optional line of text — a display name and a shoutout — published on that city's page and in the live feed. That is the whole product. It is entertainment and promotion, priced from $1.

It is not a donation and not a fundraiser. No city, municipality, tourism board or resident receives any part of it, and CityWar is not affiliated with, endorsed by or acting for any city or government named on this site. City names, populations and regions are geographic facts, not partnerships.

Because the point lands on a public board the moment the payment clears, contributions are not refundable by default. The narrow exceptions — duplicate charges, charges that never credited — are set out in the refund policy.

Every city starts at zero. A contribution adds its dollar value to that city's score; cities are ordered by score, highest first. When two cities are level, the one that was backed first holds the higher rank — so an equal top-up never demotes the city that got there first.

A city with no money behind it is unclaimed. It is not ranked, it is not on the board, and its page says so. The first $1 is what puts it there. Contributions are capped at $5,000 per payment, as a guard against a mistyped amount.

Spot bids and city float ads count towards the same score. A business buying a listing in a city is also backing that city, which is the entire reason the two products share a board.

Every city in the world with more than 100,000 residents, plus all 241 national capitals however small — 5,908 cities across 244 countries. Each one has a page from day one, whether or not anyone has ever backed it.

The names, populations, regions, coordinates and timezones come from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0. We do not edit them. If a population looks wrong it is because the source says so, and the fix belongs upstream.

Browse every city or start from a country.

Every city page sells 5 listing spots. A spot shows a business name, one line of copy and a link to its website. Spots are ordered by total spend in that city, ties broken by who bid first.

A first bid starts at $25. Bids stack rather than reset, so defending a spot is a top-up from $5rather than a fresh bid, and taking a held spot costs $1 more than the business currently holding it. Being outbid does not remove a listing: it moves below the live spots into the challenger queue, still published, until it climbs back.

Paid links carry rel="nofollow sponsored ugc" and open in a new tab. They pass no ranking signal, and a spot is worth buying for the audience or not at all.

A float is the dismissible card that hovers over a page for a fixed run — 24 hours to 30 days, either over a single city or across the whole site. When several floats are live for the same page the slot rotates between them, weighted by spend, so a large buy appears more often without owning the slot outright.

A city float credits that city's score in full. A site-wide float belongs to no city and credits none. All packages and prices.

A season runs 30 days. Season 01: Global Clash is the first, and it closes on September 25, 2026. The city holding #1 at that moment is recorded in the Hall of Fame permanently.

A season ending does not refund anything and does not take a page down. Business spots and floats run on their own clocks — a spot holds for the season it was bought in, a float for the hours or days its package names.

No invented numbers. If a board is empty it renders as empty, not as a demo. A city that nobody has backed is never shown holding a rank, and there is no seed data anywhere on this site dressed up as activity.

No invented sponsors. A business appears on a city page only because that business paid for the spot. No real company is ever named as a customer, sponsor or advertiser of CityWar unless it bought the placement itself.

No guaranteed outcome. Paying more improves a position on this board and nothing else. We do not promise traffic, clicks, customers, a rank you will keep, or that anybody will see your listing — somebody can outbid you an hour later, and that is the product working as designed.

CityWar.lol is an independent project. It is not affiliated with any city, government, tourism body or the businesses that buy listings on it. Payments are processed by Razorpay and charged in INR; card details are handled by Razorpay and never reach this site.

For anything else — a billing problem, a listing to take down, a shoutout to remove, or a city you think is missing — see the FAQ first, then the contact route in the terms.