The Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll were polls on determining the bankability of movie stars. They began quite early in the movie history. At first, they were popular polls and contests conducted in film magazines, where the readers would vote for their favorite stars, like the poll published in New York Morning Telegraph on 17 December 1911. Magazines appeared and disappeared often and among the most consistent in those early days were the polls in the Motion Picture Magazine.

Though this and numerous other magazines, like Photoplay, continued with this type of poll, the standards for the polling were set by the Quigley Publishing Company. They published a poll, which became known as the "Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll", from a questionnaire sent to movie exhibitors every year between 1915 and 2013 by Quigley Publishing Company. The list was based on a poll of movie theater owners, who were asked to name who they felt were the previous year's top 10 money-making stars. The Top 10 Poll, which appeared annually in Quigley's Motion Picture Herald and The Motion Picture Almanac, was long regarded as one of the most reliable barometers of a movie star's box-office power, as film exhibitors base their decisions on one economic criterion: those stars who will bring patrons into their theaters.

For the 1915–1924 period, the list was compiled from 200,000 exhibitor reports, published in the "What the Picture Did for Me" department in 520 weekly editions of the Exhibitors Herald magazine. The first version of the questionnaire, specifically made for the exhibitors to vote for the money-makers, was used from 1925 to 1931. It included voting for both the box office films and the stars. A standardized questionnaire specifically for choosing the biggest box office stars was used after 1933.

In addition to the top ten stars for that year, the Quigley Poll would commonly list the next 15 stars as well. A sample of these, including some of the predecessors' lists, are below:

Additional listings for 1928: 26) Joan Crawford, 27) Buck Jones, 28) Gary Cooper, 29) Janet Gaynor and George Bancroft (tied), 31) John Barrymore and Thomas Meighan (tied), 33) Reginald Denny, 34) Greta Garbo and William Boyd (tied), 36) Norma Talmadge

Additional Listings for 1929: 26) Billie Dove, 27) Delores Del Rio and Douglas Fairbanks (tied), 29) Harold Lloyd, 30) Mary Pickford and John Boles (tied)

Additional Listings for 1932: 26) Robert Montgomery, 27) James Cagney, 28) Fredric March, 29) Jack Holt, 30) Ruth Chatterton, 31) Buck Jones and Buster Keaton (tied), 33) Johnny Weissmuller, 34) Lew Ayres, 35) Sylvia Sidney, 36) John Barrymore and Polly Moran (tied), 38) Winnie Lightner and Tom Mix (tied), 40) Ralph Graves, Boris Karloff and Ramon Novarro (tied), 43) Joan Blondell, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ann Harding (tied)

Additional listings for 1933: 26) Sally Eilers, 27) George O’Brien, 28) Ann Harding, 29) Marlene Dietrich, 30) Greta Garbo, 31) Richard Barthelmess, 32) John Barrymore, 33) Buck Jones and Paul Muni (tied), 35) James Dunn, 36) Marion Davies, 37) Ruby Keeler, 38) Spencer Tracy, 39) Tom Mix, 40) Clara Bow and Kay Francis (tied), 42) Claudette Colbert, 43) Joan Blondell, 44) Laurel and Hardy, 45) Barbara Stanwyck, 46) Walter Huston, 47) Constance Bennett and Gary Cooper (tied), 49) Irene Dunne, 50) Richard Dix, Jack Holt and George Raft (tied), 53) Charles Farrell, 54) Charles Ruggles and Ruth Chatterton (tied), 55) Ronald Coleman, 56) Sylvia Sidney, 57) Katharine Hepburn, Ken Maynard and Randolph Scott (tied), 60) Jack Oakie, 61) Loretta Young, 62) Ramon Novarro and Dick Powell (tied), 64) Harold Lloyd, 65) Marion Nixon, 66) Leslie Howard and Tom Keene (tied), 86) Kate Smith