It's a separate mystery in itself why people join and never post ... With those numbers, some tiny segment of that huge crowd would say something occasionally.
Not necessarily. The Internet term lurker was coined just for those people. They'll join Internet groups/lists (here they'll often join simply to take advantage of the members' features like the ability to view attachments and the use of things like the "Show unread posts since last visit" feature), but they honestly have no desire whatsoever to take part in the conversations. They just like to watch, er, read.
I decided that the numbers came from automatic things scanning people's sites for whatever reason.... ... spam research, search engines looking sites over to list them, other things I wouldn't understand. So, there and here, the numbers may not mean anything.
We actually have that type of stuff banned here. They've tried to access the forum, but every time a new search bot shows up, we're automatically alerted to their presence and we ban them.
Or, I have a huge, appreciative, totally silent audience over there....
That could very well be.