How to pick a random contest winner?
Picking a random winner among your followers on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok or any other platform takes a minute with our online random picker once the list of entrants is ready. A giveaway is a good way to grow an audience, but it comes with a responsibility: the draw has to be fair, and it has to look fair to the people who entered. The picker works with a list you have already prepared: it does not collect comments, and it does not check who met the conditions. This guide covers the whole process — preparing the list, setting up the draw, keeping the result and showing your audience how it was made.
The short version
- Close the entries and make a list with one row per entry.
- Paste the list into the picker and check that it was split into entries the way you expect.
- Set the number of winners, plus a few reserves.
- Draw once, and save the result.
- Announce the winners together with a record of how the draw was made.
1. Prepare the list of entrants
How you collect the entries depends on the platform: the comments under a post, the reposts, a form, a spreadsheet of subscribers. Whatever the source, bring it to one plain list before the draw:
- Close the entries at the time you announced, and say which time zone you mean.
- Remove the entries that do not meet the conditions.
- Keep one identifier per row — a username or an entry number rather than a first name, because two different people can be called Anna.
- Apply the rule you announced: every comment counts as an entry, or one entry per person however often they commented.
The picker treats every row as a separate entry. If the same username appears five times in a list of seven, that person has five chances in seven of being drawn first. No duplicates does not merge those rows — it only stops the same row from being drawn twice — so in a draw with several winners the same person could still take two prizes, or be both a winner and a reserve. If your rules give one entry per person, every identifier appears in the list once. If they allow several entries per person, that person may turn up in the result more than once. And if they allow several entries but only one prize per person, decide in advance what happens to a repeat — for example, the prize passes to the next reserve who has not won yet — because No duplicates does not do that for you.
A list holds from 2 to 1000 entries of up to 200 characters each. For a bigger giveaway, number the entrants in a spreadsheet and draw the winning numbers with the random number generator instead.
2. Set up the draw
Paste the list into the Items box, or use Load from file to read it from a plain-text file. Separator is set to Automatic, which recognises line breaks and commas on its own. From a spreadsheet, copy one column of identifiers, without the header row, and paste it as a list; if an entry can contain a comma, set Separator to Line break so that it is not split in two. Do not load a CSV export with a header row, extra columns or quoted fields instead: the picker reads a file as plain text, so all of that would end up inside the entries. Choose Space yourself only when no entry contains a space — usernames, for example. Full names do, which is why spaces are never split automatically.
Set Count to the number of winners; one draw returns up to 100. Three identical prizes do not need three separate draws: set Count to 3. It is worth drawing reserves in the same go — with three prizes, set Count to 5 and treat the first three names as winners and the last two as reserves, in that order: the fourth name replaces the first winner who drops out, the fifth replaces the next. Say in the rules how long a winner has to respond and what happens if the reserves run out, so that the replacement is not a matter of opinion.
Two controls become available once Count is 2 or more. No duplicates is on by default and guarantees that no entry is drawn twice. Output format decides how the winners are listed: Each on a new line, Space-separated or Comma-separated.
3. Draw and keep the result
Press Generate. The winners appear at once, chosen with cryptographically secure randomness, and every entry has the same chance wherever it sits in the list. Copy All puts the result on your clipboard and Save to File writes it out. History keeps your last 10 draws in your browser, which is convenient but not an archive: older draws drop off, and clearing the browser's data removes them all. Keep your own record — the final list, the settings, the time of the draw and the result in order.
How to make the draw transparent
The hardest part of an online contest is convincing the audience that the result was not arranged for a friend. Three habits do most of the work. Publish the rules before the giveaway starts, including how many winners and reserves there will be. Fix the list of entrants before the draw and, where you can do so without exposing private data, show it, so that everyone can check they are on it. And draw once: repeating the draw until you like the outcome is not a random selection, however random each attempt was.
A screen recording helps. Start recording, show the list being pasted into the picker, show the settings, and capture the moment you press Generate. A recording published with the announcement shows how this draw was made. It is not an independent audit, and it cannot show that there were no earlier attempts — one more reason to announce the time of the draw in advance, or to hold it live.
Why scrolling through the comments is not a random choice
Many organisers scroll quickly through the comments and stop "at random", or sort a spreadsheet alphabetically and take the top row. Neither is random. People are drawn to familiar names, to the middle of the screen, to entries that stand out, and a sorted column simply rewards whoever comes first alphabetically. A generator has no such preferences. For how these algorithms work, read our article on what a random number generator is.
Privacy of your entrants' data
A list of entrants is personal data — names, handles, sometimes email addresses — and you are the one responsible for it. The picker is built so that the list you paste is not sent anywhere: the selection runs in your browser, a file opened with Load from file is read by the browser itself, and neither the list nor the result reaches our servers. The browser does keep the list and your settings between visits, and History keeps recent results, so on a shared computer press Clear and empty History when you have finished. When you publish the result, protect the entrants' data as well: do not show email addresses or other private details in a recording — use public usernames or entry numbers — and decide how long you keep the list afterwards. For more on running fair draws, see the random picker guides.