Is there really only 10,000 active members on ATS?

I have been reading the very bottom of my Admin U2U messages and am surprised at line that reads:

(This is a mass U2U sent to all 10474 members who have been on ATS in the past 30 days. Please do not respond to this message.)

Does that really mean only 10,000 of us are logging in at least once per month?

For the number and diversity of topics that I see on ATS, I really would have expected this to be a larger number.
10,000 just seems so small to the 6.7billion+* that are on our planet right now. The topics that this site covers are massive, not massive in details only but massive on the scale of their importance to humanity as a race.

How is it that only 10,000 of us consciously make the choice to log on to this website using our member accounts every month?

Maybe a higher power is in effect??...something linking all 10,000+ of us together....or perhaps this is just a sad fact of general worldwide human ignorance that we must face at the dawn of the 21st century.




*Actually I just realized that I should not use the World Population here and I should really be comparing 10,000 to the "Internet Population" of 1.5billion+ Population of the Internet

I think when it says active, it means people who have posted in the last 30 days.

Which would sound about right.

There's probably another 10,000+ that are registered but don't post.

Sup Chad - G'day from WA =)

Yeah I'm not too sure, maybe a staffer will jump in here. I'm just thrown by the words "who have been on ATS ".

This suggests the people have been on as in Logged On - as I think it would be good to direct the U2U messages to people who are just about to post as well as Active Posters.

Atleast its not 144,000....

The chaos would rain down

Im guessing a larger number than users registered are people that view ATS and dont make an account.Id say its in the hundreds of thousands.

Total member accounts: 157,504

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I imagine many members get ATS'd out after a while, like anything else, and "step away from the computer", so to speak, only to come back in from time to time.

Like Chadwickus said, that just represents visitors from the last 30 days.

I'm actually kind of surprised it's that many. The internet is a smaller place than you'd think.

Hell, at one point in the not-so-distant past, there were only about 200 unique IPs logged in 4chan in one day, due to administrative sillyness, and it didn't really change anything.

Originally posted by Solomons
Im guessing a larger number than users registered are people that view ATS and dont make an account.Id say its in the hundreds of thousands.

More than that. There were about 1.5 million unique visitors in January 2009, for example. See this PDF, which is on the stats page lernmore linked to. It's got lots of neat numbers. I'm actually impressed that ATS just gives this data away; most sites sell it privately to marketing firms.

Originally posted by Solomons
I'm actually impressed that ATS just gives this data away; most sites sell it privately to marketing firms.

Stats are the most important thing if a site wants to advertise, so hiding them would be useless. The more traffic, the greater the interest to have their ads on a site.

I've been on ATS a few years and "step away" every once in a while.
I don't know if it's still like this, but a lot of the time new threads would start and it would go on for a few posts and someone would come up and say that the topic had already been covered on a previous thread. They'd post a link and "bam" thread closed.

For a while it was happening constantly. It got kind of annoying and tedious. Not only were topics being beaten with a dead horse but we had to reopen stale threads as archives for everything.

Also, there's a lot of kids on this site. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of teens who are very intelligent for their age. I'm well aware that there are adults on here that are pale comparrisons to some of the younger crowd. And I certainly appreciate that ATS went through the trouble of enforcing correct grammar rules.
But still we see a lot of posts that aren't well thought out. Moot points are brought out. People with their overbearing religious and political bias that they don't back up with facts.

But I digress....
This site has a lot of information. I just think it gets tedious to weed through the trash to find it sometimes.

Though I leave sometimes... I always come back.
In the words of Mr. Universe..."'From here to the eyes and the ears of the 'Verse, that's my motto, or it might be if I start having a motto."