wilderssecurity.com (rank 44,568)

Well, if that is Big Brother then he really needs to work on improving his stats gathering. Other then the first sentence, which is a pretty obvious description of what this site discusses, the rest is none too accurate.

There are a lot of services like that one, which attempt to do website usage analysis from the outside when they don't have either access to a websites logs, or if the website in question doesn't subscribe to their service. In those cases, they work through tracking tools installed on people's PCs which phone home reporting the sites they visit. The most famous of these services is probably the Alexia Toolbar. We're listed there, too, like most sites since some percentage of people who visit here have the Alexia Toolbar installed on their PC.

This specific service states that they use "panels" which is comparable to Nielsen households in the Television ratings system, where a small group of people (relative to the entire population of all viewers) are tracked voluntarily as to what they watch. From that sample set, the rating service makes an estimate of the entire populations viewing habits. In this case, a group of people who are on that services panel are tracked regarding their web usage. Some percentage come here and from the demographics they have on their sample set, they try to make an estimate on the overall user base of Wilders.

The one problem I see with that kind of service when trying to apply it to a computing security website is that, by nature, a large percentage of the people who frequent this type of site are more wary of being tracked. They are less likely to want their clicking habits known and less likely to have either voluntary or spyware installed tracking software on their PCs. So, my guess is that the sample set tracked is much smaller than what would be needed to accurately predict either our usage levels or our members demographics with any degree of accuracy.