@canadensis DistroWatch just counts pageviews on their site about a distribution. It ranks curiosity about a distro rather than use of a distro.

My understanding of DistroWatch.com is that it counts the number of times its page about a distribution is viewed. For example the Slackware page is http://distrowatch.com/slackware. DistroWatch couldn't know about the page views of individual distribution web sites (http://www.slackware.com) unless the sites were viewed from DistoWatch or each distro web site installed a counter accessible by DistroWatch.

DistroWatch explains their statistics here.

The misunderstanding regarding the DistroWatch statistics will NEVER end.

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It's interesting to note that on DistroWatch in 2002 there were 200+ HPD (Hits per Day) for Slackware and Slackware was 7th on their list. Recently there have been twice that number 400+ HPD and Slackware is 23rd on the list. Curiosity about Slackware is increasing but not as fast as other distros.

EDIT: Slow typist. Others already explained to canadensis.

I stand corrected, thanks all.
I take it all back, Arch!

So the positive feedback in the system makes these statistics pretty questionable. People visiting Distrowatch are more likely to click on the distributions at the top of the list, meaning that those distributions stay at the top of the list attracting more clicks, etc. Distrowatch does not claim to correct for this bias.

Indeed that is a problem but it is also broken in multiple other ways, e.g. the distros themselves are not counted the same way.

It would appear the DistroWatch page hit ranking (for what little it matters) went up a bit overnight...

The hits per day are updated, http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

That would be 6:30pm CDT?

There might be a bigger jump tomorrow.