Annual public-vote contests in the Netherlands
Four annual online contests in the Netherlands recur on the public-vote calendar. The Website van het Jaar election by Emerce opens voting in August; the Gouden Televizier-Ring nomination round by AVROTROS and Televizier runs from 18 August to 15 September; the ANWB Camping van het Jaar vote runs from 10 August to 7 September; and the NS Publieksprijs of CPNB collects votes from 8 October to 5 November. Each organiser publishes its own voting window in advance and announces the outcome after it closes. Anyone who wants to take part should read the organiser's own rules page first, because windows, eligibility and vote limits differ from contest to contest and shift slightly from edition to edition.
Last confirmed against the sources on 8 October 2026.
The Website van het Jaar election opens its public voting in late summer each year.
Emerce has staged the Website van het Jaar election since 2009, and the current edition is run together with Ruigrok as an independent research partner. That partnership matters for voters because it signals that the outcome is checked against research rather than resting on the raw counter alone.
The 2026 edition opened public online voting in August and kept the vote open until 2 October 2026. A window of roughly two months is long by Dutch standards, and it means late entries to the ballot still have weeks to gather support before the deadline.
For anyone following the annual online contests in the Netherlands, this election is the anchor of the calendar's first half: it covers websites rather than television programmes or campsites, so the competition structure and the category list differ from the broadcast prizes that follow in the autumn.
The mechanics a voter sees are straightforward. Categories are listed on the election site, each category carries its own nominees, and a vote is cast from the page itself. What the organiser checks behind that simple front end is not published in detail, which is why the safest assumption is that every vote is logged, timestamped and reviewable.
- A voter who waits until the last week of September still has several days to place a vote in the 2026 edition.
- A website owner campaigning for nominations can point supporters at the election's own category pages rather than at a separate form.
- A reader comparing Dutch contests will find this is the only one of the four run by a trade publisher for websites.
The Gouden Televizier-Ring pairs a nomination round with a gala in October.
AVROTROS and Televizier stage the Gouden Televizier-Ring Gala every October, and the television prize at its centre is one of the oldest public honours on Dutch screens. The online nomination voting for the 2026 edition ran from 18 August to 15 September, a shorter window than the website election uses.
The two-step shape is the interesting part. First the public nominates, then the field narrows and the gala itself closes the season. A voter who misses the nomination window cannot simply carry a preference into the gala stage, because the shortlist has already been drawn by then.
Short windows reward early attention. A programme with a fan base that votes in the first fortnight of the window sets its position before occasional viewers arrive; the counter keeps moving for the whole window, but the early spread of nominations is what a broadcast organiser tends to read as momentum.
Compared with the camping and book prizes, this one is tied to broadcast output, so the eligibility of an entry is decided by what aired, not by what a reader or camper did. That makes the nomination round a poll on the year's television rather than an open submission contest.
- A viewer who wants a drama series on the shortlist votes during the August-to-September nomination round.
- A fan community that coordinates its nominations in week one sees its programme listed before the vote closes.
- A reader of the October gala coverage can trace which nominated programmes came out of that public round.
The NS Publieksprijs lets Dutch readers award a book every autumn.
CPNB, the collective promotion foundation of the Dutch book trade, organises the NS Publieksprijs, and readers give the prize out annually in autumn. The 2025 voting period ran from Wednesday 8 October to Wednesday 5 November, which places it firmly after the late-summer cluster of the other contests.
The rules carry a clause worth quoting to anyone building a voting calendar: CPNB holds the right to adjust the dates of the voting period. Deadlines on a foundation-run prize are therefore movable, and a voter planning around the published window should re-check it in the final week.
Because the voters are readers rather than viewers or travellers, the campaigning happens where readers gather: bookshops, reading groups and the prize's own pages. The prize's answers page also states how often a person may vote, which is the kind of published limit that settles most questions about repeat voting without guesswork.
Placing this prize in October and November also spreads the annual online contests in the Netherlands across the year instead of piling them into one month, so a voter who follows several of them faces no direct overlap between the book vote and the broadcast gala.
- A reading group that meets in early November can still vote together inside the 2025 window.
- A voter who quotes the published window in a newsletter should add CPNB's reservation of the right to change dates.
- A blogger tracking Dutch contests can schedule the book vote after the camping prize has already been decided.
ANWB's Camping van het Jaar vote closes with a winners reveal the next year.
ANWB, the Dutch travellers' association, runs the Camping van het Jaar election, and the 2027 edition accepted public votes from 10 August to 7 September 2026. What separates it from the other three is the announcement rhythm: the four winning campsites are not named when voting closes but early in 2027.
That gap between the last vote and the announcement is deliberate and worth understanding. An association that audits its own membership-facing prize does not publish the result the minute a counter stops; it verifies, ranks and then schedules a reveal. Voters who expect same-day results misread how these Dutch contests are structured.
The vote also asks for something the other contests do not: a camper's own experience of a specific site. That anchors the vote in first-hand knowledge, which is why the association frames it as sharing your favourite campsite rather than rating an industry from a distance.
For the calendar as a whole, this is the shortest window of the four and the one with the longest tail, running from a one-month vote to a winners announcement months later, early in the following year.
- A camper who voted for a site in early September 2026 waits until early 2027 for the four winners.
- A family returning from a summer holiday can nominate its favourite site inside the same month the vote closes.
- A site owner who thanks voters in September should not yet announce a result, since ANWB names winners only early in 2027.
What the law and the rules say
Every contest listed here is run by an established Dutch publisher, broadcaster or membership organisation, and each of them publishes its own rules for the edition at hand. The NS Publieksprijs rules, for instance, state that CPNB reserves the right to adjust the dates of the voting period, which is the kind of clause a voter should look for before planning around a deadline. The practical pattern across these contests is the same: a published voting window, a stated limit on how often one person may vote, and an announcement of the winners once the window has closed. Because the rules are per edition and per organiser, this page describes the mechanics these Dutch contests share; the organiser's own regulation is always the binding text for the edition you intend to vote in or enter.
What this guide does not cover
This page does not cover how to enter a nomination list on behalf of a business, does not explain the tax side of winning a prize, and never teaches anything about influencing a vote outside the organiser's own terms. It names no regional or one-off contests beyond the four on record, does not list current nominees, and does not predict the windows of future editions, because each organiser adjusts its own calendar. The TV-talent-show format, the paid-survey world and the electoral sense of voting are all out of scope here and belong to other pages of this site. For anything binding, the organiser's own regulation of the current edition is the only text that counts; this page is a calendar and a mechanics guide, not a rulebook.
Common questions
Four recur on any Dutch voting calendar: the Website van het Jaar election run by Emerce with Ruigrok as independent research partner, the Gouden Televizier-Ring staged by AVROTROS and Televizier, the NS Publieksprijs organised by CPNB, and Camping van het Jaar from ANWB. They cover four different domains: websites, television, books and campsites, so they compete for attention rather than with each other. Each is annual, each lets the public cast votes online, and each publishes its own rules and window for the edition at hand. Smaller regional contests exist alongside them, but these four are the ones with a standing calendar, a named organiser and a published voting window a voter can plan around year after year.
The pattern is late summer for most of them. The Website van het Jaar election 2026 opened its public online voting in August and kept it open until 2 October 2026. ANWB's Camping van het Jaar 2027 vote ran from 10 August to 7 September 2026. The Gouden Televizier-Ring nomination round for 2026 ran from 18 August to 15 September, ahead of the October gala. The outlier is the book prize: the NS Publieksprijs 2025 voting period ran from 8 October to 5 November 2025, placing it in autumn. Note that windows move between editions; CPNB's rules explicitly reserve the right to adjust the voting dates, so the published window of the current edition always beats any calendar from the previous one.
Named institutions, each with a standing role in its own field. Emerce, a trade publisher, has run the Website van het Jaar election since 2009 and now works with Ruigrok as an independent research partner. AVROTROS, the public broadcaster, and Televizier stage the Gouden Televizier-Ring Gala together every October. CPNB, the collective promotion foundation of the Dutch book trade, organises the NS Publieksprijs, which readers award annually in autumn. ANWB, the travellers' association, runs Camping van het Jaar for its audience of campers. The organiser matters practically as well as reputationally: it is the organiser's own rules page that sets the vote limit, the window and the announcement, not the contest site a voter lands on.
Voting and entering are two different doors, and the rules treat them separately. Voting is generally open to the public within the limits the organiser publishes: one vote per person per window is the common shape, though the exact wording lives in each organiser's own rules. Entering is narrower, because eligibility follows the category. A website must be a nominee in the website election; a programme must have aired to stand for a television ring; a book qualifies within the book prize's own list; a campsite is nominated by campers who have been there. So a reader in the Netherlands can vote in all four, but can enter only the one whose category they actually belong to, and the organiser's regulation decides that, not enthusiasm.
Through a staged announcement, not a live counter reveal. The Gouden Televizier-Ring closes its season at the gala itself, which takes place each October. ANWB's Camping van het Jaar names its four winning campsites only early in the year after the vote: the 2027 winners follow the August-to-September 2026 window by several months, a gap the organiser uses to verify and schedule the reveal. The NS Publieksprijs concludes after its autumn voting period ends. The practical lesson for voters is not to treat the closing of the window as the moment of truth; between the last vote and the announcement the organiser checks, ranks and prepares the publication, and only the organiser's own announcement is the result.
Mostly, but not blindly, and the structures differ. The public-vote prizes live on their counters: the nomination round of the television prize narrows the field by public votes, and the book and camping prizes are awarded by the public's own choices within each organiser's rules. Yet none of the organisers hands the result to the raw counter without oversight. Emerce works with Ruigrok as an independent research partner on the website election, CPNB reserves the right to adjust voting dates and applies its published rules to the votes it counts, and ANWB separates the end of voting from the announcement by months. So votes decide, but the organiser's verification and its published terms sit between the counter and the result in every one of these contests.