What attempt would you consider 'not sad'?

I wouldn't rely on a website that uses an addon to collect it's data about population.

Someone posted on, I think MMO-Champion, that Warcraftrealms were reporting 50 Alliance players TOTAL for his server.

Those sites are generally incorrect.

And for the story, this is so much a "here, give it a try, then go buy it!"

Yep. Just a cursory glance shows Archimonde-US, a server which the WoW client reports as having a 'Medium' population, has just 615 Alliance players above level 10.

Less than a guild's worth of Alliance, and no free character transfer in sight. I'd call those numbers a bit fishy.

There's a couple of flaws with your post Belghast. First off you're basing your opinion off of only your realm; out of how many? Also your looking for a third party mod to give an accurate depiction of the situation which as some other commenters have already said is not accurate.

Now I'm not oblivious to the fact that WoW has lost people, but here's the thing, this is quite common for any game people will always come and go. Also it's quite common for any company to do something to entice more people to do business with them, this is just one way for Blizzard to go about this.

Perhaps you should check the latest updates;

Loggings are UP over the last 4 weeks :))

But as someone stated : on more than 50% of those servers there are samples of ... 1 or ZERO people sampling with the /who command...and the add on...

600+ servers, 2 factions tracked, 70+ zones to track and on 50% of the servers ZERO or one person tracking a supposedly 24 hours each day with an add on that NO new players even know it exists ....

LOL , these stats are simply way to small , ... but like I said: even their loggings show the present day activity is on par with Apr 2010 and Oct 2010, which is not even odd. Even the haters and bored ones came for 2 months to CATA.

The new players don't use a 6 year old add on that has no purpose.

Warcraft Consensus works with an addon that obviously depends on people using it. IIRC it also has an out-of-game activity portion, it won't update information automatically. There are no official numbers AFAIK from Blizzard on realm populations, other than the rather vague text information of "recommended, full" etc. Last I heard an estimate for a "full" realm is there's about 10-15 thousand players online on it. Of course though with server technology having progressed since then it might be a lot more than that.

Drawing from market segmentation — where the A group represents loyal and active customers; the B group, qualified and likely prospects; the C group, possible prospects; and the D group, unlikely prospects — Blizzard is aiming squarely at Bs, presumably in an effort to leverage brand and crossover appeal. It's sound marketing, and the natural evolution of Battle.net's gathering of all franchises under one umbrella — in the past, Blizzard seemed to rely on Cs through the 10-day trial and recruit-a-friend, almost certainly with mixed results.

This may or may not be in response to suspected losses for World of Warcraft's subscriber base.

On that note, Belghast's derision is unnecessary, but player-side activity data corroborates the general and reasoned perception of Warcraft's activity: after an end-of-expansion lull, log-ins and hours played skyrocketed with Cataclysm's launch, only to begin plummeting at about the same time guild leaders everywhere hit the forums looking for able bodies to keep raids from collapsing. Who here hasn't witnessed significant drop-off? I'm personally enjoying the game (criticisms aside), but the same can't be said for a lot of colleagues; they've voted with their feet.

Are the two related? I don't think we know enough. We'll have to see.